Exploring the World

Alexander Maitland is the author of Speke, A Tower in a Wall: Conversations with Dame Freya Stark, and a biography of Robert and Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, among other books. He worked with Freya Stark on Rivers of Time, a book of her photographs, and with Wilfred Thesiger on My Kenya Days, The Danakil Diary, Among the Mountains and A Vanished World. He edited Thesiger's anthology, My Life and Travels, compiled and wrote Wilfred Thesiger: A Life in Pictures, and wrote the authorised biography, Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. In 2019, he was awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society.

Nearly all of the men and women covered are worthy of a book in their own right, and many of the big names are here: Richard Burton, David Livingstone, Colonel Percy Fawcett, Alfred Russel Wallace, Eric Shipton, Gertrude Bell and Dame Freya Stark. What emerges as the tales layer up is the inspiring singularity of so many of these intrepid individuals. They aren't all high-achieving head girl/boy types, but instead come across as often unconventional and intractable, occasionally irrational, but nearly always resolute, even in their aberrance
Bristling with heroic tales of indomitable characters forcing their way in impossible circumstances through forests, over mountains and across deserts in search of a better understanding of this world . . . as a busy person's eyebrow-raising page-turner, this book is hard to beat
A model biography of the explorer . . . Maitland has separated reality from legend . . . Meticulous research is illuminated by Maitland's evocations of Thesiger's affinity with a world characterised by desert romance
A worthy testament to an exceptional life
Masterly
Thesiger was compared to the greatest travellers of the Victorian age . . . Maitland captures that strange attractiveness, his undoubted love and understanding of a now-vanished world
This thorough biography will be fascinating to Thesiger aficionados
Maitland has done justice to an extraordinary subject
In this important biography of one of England's great legendary figures, Wilfred Thesiger's life and works are analysed in minute detail . . . it reads like an adventure story