But it is not a little consolation that out of Thesiger’s personal struggles, and isolation, came some of the most remarkable journeys and human interactions of the 20th century.Toby Green’s book on the Inquisition will be published next year by Macmillan. He spent his latter years overseeing the publication of the books which cemented his reputation, recreating the years when he had travelled with groups of young men, dominating them by force of personality and replicating, Maitland suggests, the childhood when he dominated his band of four brothers. Here, with the psychological acuity characteristic of his superb biography, Maitland appears to use his own relationship with Thesiger – as a young, potential biographer in a position of subordination – as a prism for understanding the explorer’s relationship with his guides throughout his desert travel.The last years of Thesiger’s life were lonely. When he returned to Arabia after 25 years to meet the men who had guided him across the desert, he was distressed to find them owners of 4×4s. Retiring to spend his latter years in Kenya, he gave away large sums of money to Samburu people, most of which vanished without trace. Though having “an abnormally acute perception of reality” through his journeys, he lived “in a quixotic parallel universe of his own creation”.Thesiger retired to Britain from Kenya in 1995 and died in 2003, aged 93.

For most of it, he spent at least three-quarters of each year in regions such as the marshes of Iraq (subsequently destroyed by Saddam Hussein), the Arabian deserts, the Darfur region of Sudan (where he served as a colonial officer), the mountains of Afghanistan and Iran, and the highlands of East Africa. In June 1910, a lanky baby was born to the head of the British legation in Addis Ababa. Aged three, Wilfred Thesiger witnessed his father shooting an oryx in the Ethiopian highlands, and years later he would identify this as the life-forming moment that led to his becoming the most famous British adventurer of his generation

Thesiger’s life was nothing if not well-travelled. Jonathan Kaplan appears at Jewish Book Week in London on Saturday 4 March: www.jewishbookweek . It would deprive readers of further instalments of some of the most graphic war reporting to have appeared in recent years.Tony Gould’s latest book is ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ (Bloomsbury). Now that the distinction between humanitarian and military intervention has become blurred, he wonders if it is not time for him to renounce his idealistic dreams, hang up the “compact canvas pouch of surgical instruments” he has carried since his first war in Kurdistan, settle down and think about having a family.Perhaps it is, but such a decision would not only deprive putative patients in conflict zones of an imaginative and skilful surgeon. In such a context, the kidnapping of aid workers, however reprehensible, is not entirely surprising.Kaplan describes the war in Iraq as a watershed.

Until 2003, everyone saw doctoring in conflict zones as a good thing, and “aid workers were not generally sought out as targets by the people they came to help”. But he is as critical of some aid agencies as of governments that resort to war for inadequate reasons, or reasons that have little to do with their stated intentions, as in Iraq. Just by listing the “lovely names” of the “second-wave” humanitarian groups that flocked into Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein – “Peace Wings International, Earth Network, Compassion for Innocent Victims in Conflict, Life for Relief and Development, Human Relief Foundation, Solidarity for Peacemaking and Sharing, Human Appeal International, Strategic World Impact, Global Care, Oasis of Love, Peace Volunteers and The Good People” – he throws doubt on their utility.And when he adds that “one of the evangelical groups wore bright yellow T-shirts showing a figure astride the globe with a Bible raised in one hand and a crucifix in the other, insensitive attire in any Muslim country and exquisitely provocative in Iraq”, we know we’re in a madhouse where agencies and armies (good cop and bad cop) are each part of a Janus-faced oppressor. He would also leave the country – to avoid compulsory military service in the Angolan war – but for England rather than America. He did go to Angola a quarter of a century later, but not as part of an invading army.After the fall of the Afrikaner government, South Africa was no longer involved there, though by the turn of the century the so-called “Third War” between the Marxist MPLA government and Jonas Savimbi’s anti-communist UNITA forces was under way.

Caught between the warring parties were the IDPs, “internally displaced persons”: the flotsam of war, the ill and starving people driven from their homes, fleeing they knew not whom. Os enemigos might equally be rebels or government security forces.Kaplan’s first patient in the town of Kuito was typical: an eight-months pregnant, malnourished and feverish woman (malaria was endemic) who had had the bad luck to get in the way of an “enemy” bullet. It had gone through her neck and emerged on the left side of her face, which was covered with a rough dressing. She could not speak and the “visible part of her face was frozen in an expression of unremitting horror”.In Kuito Kaplan was working with the admirable relief organisation, M?cins sans Fronti?s. I have not returned.”His parents had left Durban for the US while Jonathan was a medical student in Cape Town.