It was 10.10 pm when I entered the British Museum with my booking paper printed from the internet. I was due to see the Terracotta Army at 10.20 pm, my scheduled time; visits to the exhibition being arranged like this as booking is overwhelmed, with the Museum staying open until midnight on Thursdays and Fridays.
Just entering the museum at this time, with darkness outside and the entrance and hall virtually empty, is fascinating. But watching the exhibition is spectacular; you travel back to a time when human civilisation was at its height in Egypt with the Pharaohs, in Greece, in Italy with the Etruscans and the Romans.
Three hundred years BCE … and you enter …