A Thousand Miles Up the Nile

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From Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt to Winston Churchill and the Battle of Omdurman, via Amelia Edwards’s fabulous journey, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, the experience of the French and British, and the locals they met up and down the Nile was one of blood spilled, and ink poured. This conversation is part of a three-part series with Eamonn Gearon. Each session is designed as a stand-alone seminar as well as part of the series. Nothing of the contagious enthusiasm and wonder she conveys, as the beauties of Egypt are daily unfolded before her, is lost from the subsequent research and painstaking erudition she crams into these pages. The rest of her life she devoted tirelessly to the setting-up of professional excavation in Egypt, founding the Egypt Exploration Fund (with Reginald Stuart Poole) and establishing the first chair of Egyptology in England at University College, initially occupied by her protege Flinders Petrie. Straightened means obliged her to earn her living, and she was already a successful writer and a talented artist and musician when, in middle-age, bad weather unexpectedly changed her life. The joy is as fresh as when first felt, and the reader feels privileged to share these experiences with her. Provides an introduction to ancient Egypt. Her painting holiday in France sabotaged, she took a boat from Marseilles to Alexandria, and hired a dahabiyah to venture up the Nile.

• Sun, Sand, and Spies: Military Intelligence in the Middle East and North Africa (1914 – 1945) with Eamonn Gearon
• War, Peace, and Travel Writing: European Exploration in Egypt and the Sudan (1798 – 1898) with Eamonn Gearon
• Desert of Dunes, Dreamers, and Dramas: The Sahara as Artistic Muse with Eamonn Gearon