Fate of London's world famous library hangs in the balance

London

THE Warburg Institute here has trained generations of scholars, who liken its library of Renaissance and post-Classical material to an intellectual paradise. Now many scholars fear for the Warburg's future over a funding dispute with the University of London, which has housed the collection since 1944, after it was moved from Nazi Germany.

In recent years the Warburg has had to pay the university, which is state-run, an increasingly large percentage of its annual budget to maintain the Bloomsbury mansion that it calls home. Warburg defenders fear this will push the institute into financial ruin, putting it at risk of closing its stacks or even relocating and splitting apart its collection - a move the prominent British art historian Martin Kemp recently wrote would be "the greatest act of vandalism in Western academia of my lifetime".