Stanley I Presume
by Stanley Johnson, HarperCollins, $30
Stanley Johnson is an author, environmentalist and politician - and father of Boris Johnson, the London mayor. His career has seen him write successful thrillers, confront seal-clubbers on ice floes and be hailed for his work by Greenpeace. He has always maintained strong
links with Exmoor in Britain, where he still manages the family farm. And this is his story.
It begins with a bang - when his father, an RAF pilot in World War II, crash-lands a Wellington bomber in a Devon airfield. A few years later, Stanley's parents buy a sheep farm on nearby Exmoor, where Stanley does much of his growing up.
Stanley would keep his links with this much-loved rural idyll throughout his life - while becoming an explorer, author, occasional politician and also one of the world's first environmentalists.
A sparkling raconteur and experienced thriller writer, Stanley's great life stories are told in great style.
On leaving school in 1958, Stanley travelled alone through South America - hitching rides across the jungle on Brazilian Air Force planes - and shortly afterwards rode a motorcycle 6500km from London to Afghanistan, tracing the route of Marco Polo with two friends.
After winning Oxford University's poetry prize with a love poem - written following a hill-top tryst in the West Country - Stanley went on to do various adventurous jobs, before working for the billionaire John D. Rockefeller III, and at the World Bank, the United Nations and the European Union.
Stanley married and started a family young - Boris was born in New York when his father was 23 - and while Boris would go on to become big news, the family's forbears also provide quite a story, as Stanley discovers.
The Johnson family's roots are not just in the West Country, but in Turkey, too - where Stanley's politician grandfather Ali Kemal was torn to pieces by an angry mob. Stanley visits a Turkish village where the locals are blonde, and later he learns that he and Boris are direct descendants of George II.
A thoroughly enjoyable read.
