William de Rimpel

We're going to concentrate today on the first story, but can you just sketch for us for a minute the scholarly competition and all the backbiting and the fact rather humiliatingly that

The Brits seem to have made quite a lot of it up, and the Germans got it much more accurately, and their translations were much better.

And you've done it very well.

It reads like one of my favorite novels, Possession.

You know the Antonia Byatt?

It's very much in that style with the researchers.

Exactly.

But tell us about the story.

Who was Budge?

Who are these Germans who were better translators than he was?

Who I knew from reading stuff on Kublai Khan and sort of Nestorian monks of Central Asia he wrote about, didn't he?

His mum was a waitress, wasn't she?

And there's also a Norwegian that you highlight who produces this first major scholarly edition.

Jorgen Alexander Knudsen, is that right?

And we should say that Amenhotep III is the person, when you go to the British Museum today, that enormous colossal head that you see as you walk into that gallery with the bulls to your left.

That's him.

That's our guy.

And he is the most sculpted

figure in ancient Egypt.

And you divide your book into two with those divisions.