About this item
From a great writer legendary for his expeditions into some of the world's most forbidding places, a wise, honest and sometimes absurdist memoir of a most remarkable journey through British politics at the breaking pointRory Stewart is famously intrepid. After a stint as a British diplomat, he first made his name in America with a memoir of his two-year walk across Iran, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, essentially solo, in the months after 9/11, and he went on to perform valiant public service in war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan. Settled afterward at an academic perch at Harvard, he quickly became restless. With scant hope of winning the primary, and no prior connection to politics, he stood for a seat in Parliament representing a rural district in Cumbria, the idyllic locale of the Lake District and also one of the poorest districts in England.
About the Author
Rory Stewart was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Malaysia. He served briefly as an officer in the British Army (the Black Watch) , studied history and philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford and then joined the British Diplomatic Service. He worked in the British Embassy in Indonesia and then, in the wake of the Kosovo campaign, as the British Representative in Montenegro. In 2000 he took two years off and began walking from Turkey to Bangladesh. He covered 6000 miles on foot alone across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal -- a journey described in In 2003, he became the coalition Deputy Governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar -- two provinces in the Marsh Arab region of Southern Iraq. He has written for a range of publications including the , the , the , the , the and . In 2004, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire and became a Fellow of the Carr Centre at Harvard University. In 2006 he moved to Kabul, where he established the In 2010 he was elected as a Conservative member of the British Parliament.