About ten years ago, on a previous visit to Egypt, William Golding arrived at 'a simple truth: that Egypt is a complex country of more-or-less Arab culture and it is outrageous for the uninformed visitor to confine himself to dead Egyptians while the strange life of the valley and the desert goes on all round him.' This time, therefore, it was going to be different: the Goldings would hire a boat on which they would live, 'proceeding up and down the Nile, stopping off at such places of interest as Oxyrhynchus and Abydos; and mingling lightheartedly with live Egyptians instead of dead ones'.

LRB 3 October 1985 | PDF Download