English Summary/英文概要： Egypt fascinated Golding all his life. Here, in the first of these three stories, Golding recreates the world of ancient Egypt at the time of the earliest pharaohs. His marvellously funny -- though characteristically unsparing -- view is combined with his vivid realisation of the dust, colour and blazing sunlight of a world he had imagined since childhood.
’Clonk Clonk’ plunges us into an even more ancient way of life, primitive, delightful, matriarchal. It contains one of Golding’s most appealing female characters, as well as a fascinating and surprising portrayal of masculinity.
’Envoy Extraordinary’ brings to life the court of a Roman emperor, nameless, benign yet accustomed to power. He is confronted by a brilliant but unsophisticated Greek whose fertile inventions, centuries before their time, include printing, the pressure cooker, and explosives. This story, later adapted by Golding as his play ’The Brass Butterfly’, is fastidiously comic, philosophical and, as always with Golding, full of narrative irony.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 戈尔丁一生对埃及着迷。在这本书3个故事的第一个故事中，戈尔丁重塑了法老时代的古埃及。他为我们刻画了一个他儿时想象中的世界，并以他幽默又讽刺的独特视角为我们讲述这个故事。在第二个故事“叮当叮当”里，他带我们走进一个更加古老的的生活：原始、快乐、母系氏族。故事里包含了戈尔丁小说中最吸引人的女性形象之一，同时也有迷人独特的男性描写。最后一个故事“特派公使”中，我们见到了罗马帝国的皇帝，而他将遇到一个才华横溢却单纯的希腊人。(RH)

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, submarines and aircraft. He was present at the sinking of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-day invasion, and later at the island of Welcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961.

Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.