Unfortunately both the social media and our often politically biased news broadcasters and newspaper industry have the tendency to soon forget tragedies like the deaths a few days ago, of seventy-nine innocent immigrants forced to live in a substandard council tower block, ironically located in Kensington, one of the richest boroughs in London. Given that there are four thousand of these tower blocks here in the UK, every man woman and child living in them has the right to be safe.

To date, no one in authority (neither Kensington Borough Council nor the Government) has taken charge of the situation, or admitted culpability. Nor has the borough’s sleeping partner responsible for the safety of the tower block been named and shamed, despite the vast crowd of angry people demanding justice for the victims, who marched on the Council offices!

Instead its the people living in the neighbourhood surrounding what…

Mummy movies play an undeniably powerful role in feeding (pre)conceptions about ancient Egypt among the general public, particularly for museum-goers. In my experience of working with school groups in the last ten years, a good deal of time was spent correcting misinformation gleaned from the swashbuckling Brendan Frasier/Rachel Weiss 1999 ‘Mummy’ franchise. To ignore the most recent re-boot, starring Tom Cruise and on general realise from today, would be churlish. Some Egyptologists will simply laugh it off while others will grumble about inaccuracies, perhaps assuming that Egyptology is in some way an exact science or that museums don’t construct their own ‘facts’ about the Egyptians all the time.

Leaving aside the issue of the quality of the film (which I actually found quite enjoyable), ‘The Mummy’ tells us some interesting things about museums, archaeological research and the ancient Egyptians. The film’s opening exposition connects with very current issues –…