FEW modern travel writers excite more hostility and awe than Sir ★Wilfred Thesiger[1], who died in 2003. Despising the“drab uniformity of the modern world”, Sir Wilfred ★slogged across [2] Africa and Asia, especially Arabia, on animalsand on foot, immersing himself in tribal societies. He delighted in killing—lions in Sudan in the years before the second world war, Germans and Italians during it. He disliked “soft” living and “★intrusive[3]” women and revered murderous savages, to whom he gave guns. He thought educating the working classes a waste of good servants. He kicked his dog. His journeys were more notable as feats of ★masochistic[4] endurance than as exploration. Yet his first two books, “Arabian Sands”, about his crossing of the Empty Quarter, and“The Marsh Arabs”, about southern Iraq, have a ★terse[5] brilliance about them. As records of
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