Wilfred Thesiger

Wilfred Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910, the son of a British diplomat, and the landscapes of his African childhood formed him permanently. He hunted lion as a young man, was educated at Eton and Oxford, and then spent the rest of his life systematically abandoning the comforts that background represented.

His two crossings of the Empty Quarter of Arabia — Rub' al Khali, the largest continuous sand desert in the world — are described in Arabian Sands (1959). He crossed it with Bedouin companions, on camel, in conditions of extraordinary physical hardship, and he wrote about the journey with a discipline and clarity that matched the landscape. He was motivated not by exploration — the region had been crossed before — but by the desire to travel as the Bedouin travelled, dependent on their knowledge and hospitality.

The Marsh Arabs (1964) documents the years he spent with the Ma'dan people of the Iraqi marshes — a civilisation of extraordinary antiquity that survived on artificial islands of woven reeds. Saddam Hussein drained the marshes in the 1990s; Thesiger's book is now the definitive record of a world that no longer exists in the form he described.

He was present at the famous ending of Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush — meeting the amateur adventurer with icy courtesy and genuine bewilderment — and the anecdote says something accurate about Thesiger: his standards for hardship were not those of other people.