‘excellent… riveting… Wilkinson is a consummate historian… He has mastered the facts with painstaking research and allowed them to speak for themselves. Rarely do the facts speak this clearly’
The New York Times
‘It would be hard to overstate the excellence of Wilkinson’s storytelling’
The Spectator
‘fascinating… “A World Beneath the Sands” is more than a saga of foreigners in the desert – it also follows Egypt on its rocky path to the 20th century’
The Economist
‘dramatic, detailed and eccentric-packed… as Toby Wilkinson shows, the discovery of lost monuments, grave goods and mummified corpses also stimulated the emergence of their true inheritors, the modern Egyptian nation’
Wall Street Journal
‘highly colourful… the scholarship, the imperialism and the looting – all [are] skilfully and entertainingly plotted’
The Sunday Times
‘elegantly written’
BBC History Magazine
‘Wilkinson marshals a wealth of detail into a cohesive and entertaining narrative… an essential portrait’
Publishers Weekly