Search Results

“... Wilfred Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and spent the first nine years of his life in Abyssinia. Visions of Abyssinian barbarism and splendour were to stay with him for the rest of his life, in particular his presence at Ras Tafari’s victory parade in 1916 after a battle on the plain at Sagale. The defeated but proud Negus Mikael walked in chains, while victorious tribesmen with spears, banners, drums, trumpets and horses draped in the bloody clothing of slain enemies processed in triumph through the Abyssinian capital ...”

“... Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs are classics in line with Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta. Yet his new autobiographical sketch, Desert, Marsh and Mountain, though it borrows large chunks of the two earlier books, is more absorbing than either. The subtitle, ‘The World of a Nomad’, gives a clue about what he is up to ...”

“... In the eyes of Wilfred Thesiger, the world has all but succumbed to galloping and indiscriminate Westernisation. He is grateful to have completed his wanderings just in time. Unlike Chesterton’s Last Hero, the Last Explorer will not need to cry, at the end: Know you what earth shall lose tonight, what rich uncounted loans, What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones? A few tales may well remain untold, but the heavy gold (with a certain amount of ballast) is here in The Life of My Choice, a treasure galleon built to the same specifications as Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs ...”

“... neatly written, and full of a dry detached humour, make Lawrence of Arabia or Bruce Chatwin, even Wilfred Thesiger and Freya Stark, look like the most tremendous show-offs, auto-destructive as wildlife films on TV. But then flamboyance – or flamboyant understatement – is usually what travel writing is about. It is a style that protects and passes the ...”

“... excellence for centuries past. Although it continued to attract an unusual variety of people, from Wilfred Thesiger to Dudley Moore, it was as likely to be known for the radicalism of its fellows as anything else: A.J.P. Taylor liked to argue that the college chapel should be turned into a swimming-pool. Meanwhile the college was badly run, the buildings ...”

“... whose traces Young discovers in Pulan Laut in 1977. Along with Young on that trip there is also Wilfred Thesiger, the celebrated traveller who spent years among the desert Arabs; he seems withdrawn and strangely out of place on the yacht Fiona, as it prowls the Makassar strait among the Bugis tribespeople, who have a particular fascination for Gavin ...”

“... his publishers say, was the fourth European to cross the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia (shades of Wilfred Thesiger); he has also memorably traversed the Sahara. Touch the Happy Isles is a refreshingly acerbic account of island-hopping in the Caribbean, one of the notable pleasures of life for those who do not fret too much about missing the odd ...”

“... it can still be dangerous. After some hours of night driving, and just when I’m thinking that Wilfred Thesiger would really despise this four-wheel drive voyage across Arabian sands, the murafiq suddenly shoots ahead of us to the right and switches off his lights, disappearing instantly in the total darkness. I’ve been told at the start that this ...”

“... the blue-blooded, imperially-reared, Eton and Oxford-educated traveller, administrator and writer Wilfred Thesiger. Most of all, Stewart shares the passion for the ‘Orient’ that has long exerted its pull on British male travellers; it inspired his first book. Stewart opens The Places In Between with the unassuming disclaimer that he ‘is not good at ...”

“... lured from the nearly burns and inlets, but no: Early in the New Year of 1956, I travelled with Wilfred Thesiger to spend two months or so among the little known Marsh Arabs, or Ma’dan, of Southern Iraq. By then it had crossed my mind … that I should like to keep an otter instead of a dog … [...”

“... this quality, and its attendant self-centredness, that makes Freya Stark (with, some might say, Wilfred Thesiger) second only to Doughty as an Arabian travel-writer. Where Gertrude Bell, a grand Victorian lady who believed that it was essential for the natives to know that one came ‘from a great and honoured stock’, travelled with her cook, her ...”

“... is rarely hard to see which is dominant. Evelyn Waugh in Ethiopia was an adventurer sans phrases. Wilfred Thesiger, although unquestionably adventurous, was an admirer. In 1916, at the age of six, he had watched Ras Tafari’s triumphal entry into Addis Ababa, his enemies hauled behind him in an atrocious procession. ‘I believe that day implanted in me ...”

“... would not go to a country where I did not speak the language,’ says the doctor, confirming that Wilfred Thesiger he isn’t. Now Rupert and the nurse help me up from the table and suddenly seeing us side by side, a solution to the crime presents itself to the policeman, a solution (the police being the same the world over) which hardly makes it a crime ...”