Arabian Sands is Wilfred Thesiger's record of his extraordinary journey through the parched "Empty Quarter" of Arabia. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Thesiger was repulsed by the softness and rigidity of Western life—"the machines, the calling cards, the meticulously aligned streets." In the spirit of T. E. Lawrence, he set out to explore the deserts of Arabia, traveling among peoples who had n…
Wilfred Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and educated at Fion and Oxford where he got his blue for boxing. In 1935 he joined the Sudan Political Service and, at the outbreak of war, was seconded to the Sudan Defence Force. He later served in Abyssinia. Syria, and with the S.A.S. in the Western Desert, and was awarded the D.S.O. Since the war he has travelled in Southern Arabia, Kurdista…