There are a number of things even his greatest admirers must wonder about Wilfred Thesiger. Why did he put himself through such God-awful agonies just to cross, say, an uncrossed desert? And what exactly was his relationship with those beautiful Bedouin boys who are always coyly referred to as his companions"? Asher addresses these and a host of other topics with relish in this consistently fascinating biography in which we learn, among a million other things, that the plural of "Bedouin" is actually "Bedu" and that the same Bedu habitually deal with homosexual overture by means of a swift slash of a knife. Asher manages to convey both admiration for his implacable subject and criticism of many of his entrenched ideas, so that Thesiger emerges from it all as a more complex character than his own rather one-dimensional, if engagingly opinionated, writing would suggest.
