It all started with heaps of family letters – nothing sorted, the dates out of order, conversations scrambled. It had been suggested that I should write a biography of my grandfather, Arthur Weigall, who was an archaeologist well-known in his day, living and working in Egypt before the First World War. I am not an archaeologist nor an Egyptologist, and I knew that the target audience probably would be experts. It was daunting. Much research lay ahead into the Egypt of my grandfather’s day and the state of archaeology then.
But the letters caught me. My grandfather wrote to everyone in the family, often about his work, informally and excitedly, mixing it in with all the other kinds of things that go into a letter to a mother,
