Few modern travel writers excite more hostility and awe than Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who died in 2003. Despising the "drab uniformity of the modern world", Sir Wilfred slogged across Africa and Asia, especially Arabia, on animals and 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" women and revered murderous savages, to whom be 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 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 brilliance about them. As records of ancient cultures on the point of oblivion, they are unrivalled. Sir Wilfred’s critics invariably sing the same chorus. They accuse him of hypocrisy, noting that his part-time primitive lifestyle required a private income and good connections to obtain travel permits. They argue that he deluded himself about the motives of his adored tribal companions. In Kenya, where he lived for two decades towards the end of his life, his Samburu "sons" are calculated to have fleeced him of at least $ 1m. Homosexuality, latent or otherwise, explains him, they conclude, pointing to the photographs he took of beautiful youths. This may all be true, but it does not diminish his achievements. Moreover, he admits as much himself in his autobiography and elsewhere, in 1938, before his main travels, for example, Sir Wilfred wrote of his efforts to adopt foreign ways:" I don’t delude myself that I succeed but I get my interest and pleasure trying." In this authorised biography, Alexander Maitland adds a little colour to the picture, but no important details. He describes the beatings the explorer suffered at his first boarding school. Quoting from Sir Wilfred’s letters, he traces the craggy traveler’s devotion to his dead father, his mother and three brothers. At times, Sir Wilfred sounds more forgiving, especially of friends, and more playful than his reputation has suggested. As for his sexuality, Mr. Maitland refers coyly to occasional "furtive embraces", presumably with men. Wearisome as this topic has become, Mr. Maitland achieves nothing by skirting it; and his allusion to Sir Wilfred’s "almost too precious" relationship with his mother is annoyingly vague. There may be a reason why Mr. Maitland struggles for critical distance. He writes that he and Sir Wilfred were long-standing friends, but he fails to mention that he collaborated with the explorer on four of his books and later inherited his London flat. If Mr. Maitland found it so difficult to view his late friend and benefactor objectively, then perhaps he should not have tried. An earlier biography by Michael Asher, who scoured the deserts to track down Sir Wilfred’s former fellow travellers, was better; Mr. Maitland seems to have interviewed almost nobody black or brown. His book is, however, a useful companion to the explorer’s autobiography, The Life of My Choice. Hopefully, it will also refer readers back to Sir Wilfred’s two great books, and to sentences as lovely as this:" Memories of that first visit to the Marshes have never left me: firelight on a half-turned face, the crying of geese, duck flighting in to feed, a boy’s voice singing somewhere in the dark, canoes moving in procession down a waterway, the setting sun seen crimson through the smoke of burning reed-beds, narrow waterways that wound still deeper into the Marshes.\