William de Rimpel

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be back.

And we're bringing him back to Empire Now with his latest book, which I have just finished today, Love, War, and Diplomacy, the Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed.

Welcome back, Eric.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Eric's ties.

Eric has a whole Instagram site dedicated to his ties, which you should now go and check out.

When did you write that down?

We have to say, actually, that I think all three of us have been totally obsessed with this story since childhood.

Eric, you, I know, very much had this as a childhood thing.

And you, Anita, obviously, have your school notebooks too.

Absolutely.

And quite a lot of the stories that you tell in this book are missing their first page or don't have their conclusion.

We have one tablet in a group and we don't get the end or the beginning of the story.

Eric, one of the great pleasures of this book, and one of the reasons it's such a fascinating read, is that you've done that thing that often novelists do, where you've got sort of two time periods running, and you're telling two stories which you go back and forwards from.

On one hand, you've got the main story, which is Akhenaten and his father and Nefertiti and Tutankhamen.

But you've also got the story of the antiquities dealers, the different...

scholarly institutions in Berlin and London that are trying to make sense of all these things.