Kevin Jackson
Revenge of the Pharaonic Cobra
The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy
By Roger Luckhurst
Oxford University Press 321pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
Chances are you will recall the story of the notorious Tutankhamun curse, which was one of the press sensations of the early 1920s. On 5 April 1923, just seven weeks after Howard Carter opened the Egyptian monarch’s tomb, his rich patron, George Herbert (fifth Earl of Carnarvon), died from a fever. It was caused, probably, by a mosquito bite. Nothing so odd about that, but some leading imaginative writers of the day were not content to let the matter lie.
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