Between the two World Wars, the most famous employee of the British Museum was a cat called Mike. For some twenty years, Mike made it his home and his friend was a most irregular Egyptologist, Wallis Budge, a freebooting fieldworker and smuggler of antiquities. It was a time when the wildest spiritualist ideas were in full resurgence, when ghosts, mummies and lethal curses were held to stalk the earth and many leading scientists, writers and thinkers...