People who put their trust in human power delude themselves

One thing history teaches is the transience and futility of power, and the ultimate impotence of those who exercise it. That is the lesson of the current King Tut exhibition. No group of sovereigns ever enjoyed the illusion of power more than the pharaohs of the New Kingdom, especially those of the 18th and 19th dynasties. Rameses II spent much of his 66 years on the throne having immense images of himself displayed everywhere from Luxor to Abu Simbel, and many remain, chipped and crumbling. Nothing else. The point is admirably made in Shelley’s sonnet about him, ‘Ozymandias’. I once wished to recite it on a TV books programme. The celebrity in charge, a Rameses of his day, tried to stop me. But the show was live, and I have a firm voice, so I had my way. Now he, like the pharaohs, is toppled from his studio throne, and I have forgotten his name.

Sometimes, when I wake in the middle of the night, I hear the endless tramp, tramp, tramp of humanity crossing the arches of the years, each rank enjoying the spotlight of prominence, then passing into oblivion. How pathetically incapable we are of keeping our brief candle alight one second beyond its term! How fragile is the grip on authority even the most ruthlessly successful contrive to assert, after so much striving! I often think of Bonaparte, in the summer of 1812, at the head of a million men, kings and princes at his feet, poised to conquer Russia; then the miserable fugitive, three years later, climbing stiffly up the side of HMS Bellerophon, and writing his futile letter to the Prince Regent, soliciting in vain an honourable asylum.