When I was a child, my heroes came from books. My mother took us to the library every Saturday morning. My favourite Saturday afternoons were spent sprawled on my bed after coming home loaded with books. I would provision myself with a pitcher of Tang, a box of soda crackers and slabs of Velveeta. Belly down, I’d read until I had the pattern of my chenille bedspread embossed onto my arms, and it was suppertime.

Jean-Jacques Champollion and Douglas Bader were my childhood book heroes.

Champollion was a strange choice. He was like Theo vanGogh — supporting the work of a brother who became famous. The Champollion boys were both interested in Egyptology. Jean-Francois studied languages like Arabic, Syrian and Aramaic. By the age of seventeen, he began to work towards solving the mystery hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone, the trilingual basalt tablet that had been found in Egypt in 1799. He cracked the code in about 1822, and modern translations of hieroglyphs are now possible.

Meanwhile Jean-Jacques became a paleographer, a professor of Greek at Grenoble and a curator of manuscripts at the Biblioth