An Egyptian Journal

A first-hand journal about the Goldings' travels through Egypt, soon after winning the Nobel Prize, living on a motor cruiser on the Nile. Nothing went quite as planned, but William Golding's vivid and honest account of what actually happened, and of what he saw and felt about ancient Egypt and the exasperations of the living present, will delight his innumerable admirers and everyone who visits Egypt.



'One of the funniest anti-travel books I have ever read.' Daily Telegraph



'No previous book brings you so close to Golding the man. It bulges with abstruse knowledge . . . and is often screamingly funny . . . Hugely enjoyable.' The Times



William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, submarines and aircraft. He was present at the sinking of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Welcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961. Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.