The Perfect Gift For the Reader in Your Life

Wallis Budge: Magic and Mummies in London and Cairo (Rev. Ed, 2021), was researched and written with readers in mind.

I wrote Wallis Budge, not to satisfy the requirements for tenure or promotion, but for the thrill of discovery and the joy of writing. The style and mood of the book is novelistic, as are all the histories I love to read. For those who love Dickens' Great Expectations or the novels of Anthony Trollope, there is much to love in the life of Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, whose life was woven beautifully into the changing social and historical patterns of Victorian and Edwardian England and the Empire.

One of the wonderful things about writing Wallis Budge is that it brought together so many of the things I have loved for decades: British History, Middle Eastern History, Modern European Intellectual History, Egypt and Egyptology, the Ottoman Empire, travel writing, and museums and collecting. I wandered Cairo and Istanbul, Luxor and Siwa. London and Oxford as I wrote this book, and these places are surely also a part of the story.

When I wrote this book, it was not just to convey a new and profoundly different view of the life of this fascinating man. It was also to write a book that readers could enjoy. As Geoffrey Clarfield said, in a review in Academic Questions, "George Eliot would have felt at home reading this fascinating tour de force...Ismail’s book should one day be a classic."

Please consider buying Wallis Budge for the reader in your life. It was a joy to write, and I suspect that this joy would convey itself to the experience of the reader!