In a career that spans the twentieth century from the confident days of the late Edwardians to the anxious, postcolonial age, Wilfred Thesiger has earned wide acknowledgment as his era's greatest explorer and the author of two travel classics, Arabian Sands (1959) and The Marsh Arabs (1964). Immensely distinguished, both revered and despised, and a figure of awkward, if imperfectly consistent, integrity, Thesiger--who has frequently been called "the last explorer"--has raised important questions about the modern world's relationships to developing countries and to the environment.

The eldest of three brothers, Wilfred Patrick Thesiger was born on 3 June 1910 in a wattle-and-daub hut within the British legation in Addis Ababa, the capital of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia), to Capt. the Honourable Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger and Kathleen Mary Thesiger, née Vigors. His father was His Britannic Majesty's Consul-General and Minister Plenipotentiary to the emperor of Abyssinia, Lij Yasu. His grandfather, Maj...