THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RANULPH FIENNES

My admiration for Ran is unbounded and thank God he exists. The world would be a far duller place without him. H.R.H. Prince Charles

Look for a brave spirit, is the family motto of the Twiselton-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 of wounds in the Italian Campaign the year before he was born. Inevitably, Ranulph followed his path into the Royal Scots Greys where his father had served as Lieutenant Colonel in the Western Desert. Before that came miserable years at Eton, where his good looks attracted the unwelcome attentions of older boys. After the Royal Scots Greys came the SAS, from which he was dismissed for blowing up an American film set at the idyllic Cotswold village of Castle Combe, then two vicious years as a volunteer fighting communist insurgents in Oman. Amongst other false starts, he tried acting and was short-listed for the part of James Bond in an 007 film. It was at roughly this time that Fiennes began the series of expeditions which caused The Guinness Book of Records to hail him in 1986 as the world’s greatest living explorer. Up the White Nile in a hovercraft, parachuting on to Europe’s highest glacier, forcing his way up 4000 miles of the terrifying rivers of northern Canada and Alaska, overland to the North Pole, and finally the greatest expedition of them all, ranking with the exploits of Scott and Shackleton, to the ends of the earth, across the world’s axis The Transglobe Expedition, that took ten years form conception to completion. Ranulph Fiennes has been honoured by distinguished bodies throughout the world. What drives this extraordinary man? Here he talks with the devastating candour about his wild and almost delinquent childhood, his need for authority and his compulsive rebelliousness and most especially the romance of his marriage to a childhood sweetheart, a passionate love story that has oscilated from sublime perfection to near break-up.

But above all he writes about his extraordinary adventures, and of the accompanying excitement, hardship, stress, teamwork and sheer courage. Baronet, soldier, author, adventurer, Ranulph Fiennes is an English hero in the classic mould, a man of whom it can literally be said that he has been everywhere and done everything.