Irving Finkel is enthusiastic for “real literature” – he’d pay £1 million never to read The Hungry Caterpillar again. A curator at The British Museum, he prefers bits of clay, tablets unearthed in Mesopotamia with cuneiform writing on them, dating back to before 3000 BC.

Some of these contain the first stories ever written, in the earliest ever pictorial script which developed into Sumerian, a language used in the first Babylonian dynasty.

In 1872, a George Smith found a piece narrating the flood. Finkel’s subject is the epic tales of the charismatic Sumerian King Gilgamesh, contained in 12 tablets, published in translation these days by Penguin.

The tablets are so perfectly preserved Finkel feels quite smug alongside colleagues who have had to rely on “adopt-a-book” schemes to maintain much newer texts.

You wouldn’t look twice at them at a car boot sale, he said, passing around an unremarkable fragment of baked clay; on closer inspection a few markings were plain to see, still unremarkable unless you know its provenance.

Finkel’s knowledge and passion was plain; he was just getting started he said, when time was up. Regrettably, though, it was very difficult to hear at times; Google will fill in the gaps today luckily.