I blame the Rosetta Stone. Early for a meeting near the British Museum, I took a detour to revisit the ancient artefact. It’s inscribed with the same words three times over: first in hieroglyphs, then Demotic, and finally in Ancient Greek. It’s both beautiful as a carved object and revolutionary as a decoder of hieroglyphic […]
If I hadn’t been kneeling on the ground fumbling for my lost earring, I wouldn’t have noticed the low, drystone wall made of leftovers. Parsimonious builders, restoring a fourteenth-century chateau in Provence, had scooped up all the spare bits and turned them into something else. The elegant arch, which once graced the front door, is […]
