In 1907/08 Ferdinand Platt (known to his family as Ferdy) traveled to Egypt as personal physician to the ailing 8th Duke of Devonshire--one of the giant statesmen of the late Victorian age--and his family party, recounting his adventure in letters to his young wife in England. Throughout the journey Ferdy not only reported on the sights of the country around him, with his amateur Egyptologist's eye, and the people he met along the way (including Howard Carter and Winston Churchill) but also recorded his private thoughts and intimate observations of a formal and stratified society, soon to be witness to its own extinction.