Advent 8

Volume 8 (Edwa to Extract): Egypt.

History, bloody hell - it's just one bloody thing after another. And today's page 63 pitches us into the middle of Egypt, all sixty-eight Britannica pages of it.

My predictable instinct was to drone on about Shakespeare's Egypt, Antony and Cleopatra being one of the candidates for my favourite play and, if I say so myself, the subject of one of the better chapters in my thesis. But no, by a piece of serendipity I shall regale you with a reference to a favourite artwork. A large print of this used to adorn my office wall back when I was a legal services mogul in Walsall. Stop laughing at the back! It is The Sphinx and the Great Pyramids of Giza, by none other than David Roberts. And yes, there were some clients kind/daft enough to ask if I had painted it myself.

Cleopatra, the Suez Crisis, Nasser, Sadat. There's plenty to get your teeth into with a total area of 386,100 square miles of which only about 3.6% is normally habitable. Now, not many people know that. Mind you those are 1959 figures.