Earlier this year a Swedish archaeologist based at Gothenburg University’s Centre for Critical Heritage Studies published an unfounded ad hominem attack on me in the pages of the International Journal of Cultural Property. I am grateful to the editors for this right to reply to Staffan Lundén’s wholly spurious claims, and order to correct the record. Despite its provocative, “clickbait” title, not one substantive mistake or incorrect fact was identified in Lundén’s article in my book “The Brutish Museums”. The motivation for Lundén’s serial accusations against colleagues with whose scholarship on the history of the Benin Expedition he disagrees - from curators at the British Museum to members of the Royal Court of Benin - is discussed. In conclusion, the allegation that my book The Brutish Museums is “part of a trend away from pro-British perspectives” is contextualised and refuted. On the contrary, this reply argues, openness and transparency about the colonial past and present is a key element of the reclamation and reimagining of Britishness that is unfolding in the 2020s – this unfinished period that the book calls “the decade of returns”.