Armed with a university degree, the Boy Scout's solemn oath and a snakebite kit which he left on the plane, Ian Smillie set out more than 50 years ago to confront ignorance, want and war. He taught at a remote school in Sierra Leone, was an aid administrator in Nigeria during the Biafran War and for a time he knew more about cement than anyone else in Bangladesh.

In his travels as a writer, consultant and teacher, he had encounters with Graham Greene, Wole Soyinka, James Baldwin, the Queen and the 'Butcher of Beijing'. He was instrumental in the campaign to halt blood diamonds, and he was the first witness at the war crimes trial of Liberian warlord Charles Taylor. Smillie's story moves from war-torn Bosnia, the Khyber Pass and a Paul McCartney quest in Moscow, to a just-before-9/11 meeting at the Bin Laden-obsessed CIA headquarters in Langley.

This is a memoir about development: personal development, the development of ideas and understanding, rights and justice, war and peace, poverty and prosperity. It's about one of the greatest imperatives of our time: the drive to end global poverty and why, despite exaggerated claims to the contrary, it isn't working. Bill Clinton called one of his books about international development 'insightful' and of another, The Economist said, 'Read Smillie if you want something constructive.'