Dave Itzkoff reports in the New York Times that Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, has been named Briton of the Year by The Times of London. MacGregor, who joined the museum in 2002 when it was nearly $7 million in debt and had closed one-third of its galleries, has since helped restore it to an attraction that now receives more than six million visitors a year. He was also believed to be among the candidates to replace Philippe de Montebello at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In naming MacGregor for the distinction, Rachel Campbell-Johnston noted in The Times that, “He is a committed idealist who, in a world in which culture is increasingly presented as the acceptable face of politics, has pioneered a broader, more open, more peaceable way forward.”