CAMPBELL PRICE is one of the great communicators on all things ancient Egypt — check out his excellent YouTube seminar on the subject and you’ll see why — and his interest in that ancient world was first piqued at a very young age at the Kelvingrove Museum in his native Glasgow.

“The perfume of antiquity” which pervaded the Egyptian objects on display drew him in: “I’ve been hooked ever since,” he says. He’s Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, which houses one of Britain’s largest Egyptology collections, and he has just published a new book Mummies of Egypt, which investigates the colonial acquisition of Egyptian antiquities and the ways in which they have been interpreted in the Western world.

Despite an outstanding academic track record, he admits to taking a “somewhat childish” sense of excitement forward into a career in Egyptology. “Egyptian colleagues tend to develop an interest slightly later in life and have a somewhat more mature attitude to the subject compared to many non-Egyptian Egyptologists,” he says.