Living Dangerously Book

Look for a brave spirit' is the family motto of the Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, an old English family whose ancestry traces back, via French and English kings, to the ninth century. The tradition of a thousand years of courageous, resourceful and wild forebears lives on in Ranulph Fiennes. Brought up in South Africa, he never knew his father, who had died in the Italian Campaign the year before he was born. Ranulph followed his father's path into the Royal Scots Greys. After that came the SAS, from which he was dismissed for blowing up an American film set at the idyllic Cotswold village of Castle Combs, then two vicious years as a volunteer fighting communist insurgents in Oman. Then began the series of expeditions for which Fiennes is best known and which caused The Guinness Book of Records to hail him in 1984 as 'the world's greatest living explorer.' Up the White Nile in a hovercraft, parachuting onto Europe's highest glacier, forcing his way up 4,000 miles of terrifying rivers in northern Canada and Alaska, overland to the North Pole and to the ends of the earth, across the world's axis-the Transglobe Expedition-which took ten years from conception to completion. He writes here too about his attempt to reach the North Pole without dogs or motorised equipment, beating the world record by 300 miles, his determination to find the lost city of Urbar in the Arabian desert and, finally, his extraordinary journey across the Antarctic Continent via the South Pole. Living Dangerously is a remarkable testament from a remarkable man. Writing with great honesty and humour, Ranulph Fiennes gives us a taste of the excitement, hardship, vital teamwork and the sheer courage which is the life of the modern explorer. He is an English hero in the classic mould — a man of whom it can justly be said that he has been everywhere and done everything.