Norman Lewis recounts the first half of his adventurous life with his dry, infectious, laconic wit. He takes us on a journey that transforms a stammering schoolboy into a worldly-wise multilingual sergeant in the Intelligence Corps on the point of becoming (in Auberon Waugh’s words) ‘the greatest travel writer alive, if not the greatest since Marco Polo’. We leave him in 1950, just before he started creating that series of superbly crafted, wry but deeply humane travel books: Dragon Apparent, Golden Earth, The Honoured Society and Naples ‘44.