Nigel Barley

Photo: Sophie Bassouls, Sigma:

Nigel Barley was born in Kingston-on-Thames, UK, in 1947. He read Modern Languages at Cambridge and completed a doctorate in Social Anthropology at Oxford. After a number of academic positions, he joined the British Museum as an Assistant Keeper in the Department of Ethnography, where he remained until 2003.

Barley’s first book, THE INNOCENT ANTHROPOLOGIST, published in 1983, was a witty and informative account of fieldwork amongst the Dowayo people of Cameroon. On its publication, the Daily Telegraph wrote of him: “He does for anthropology what Gerald Durrell did for animal-collecting.” He has gone on to publish a series of works ranging across Africa and Indonesia in several genres - travel, art, historical biography and fiction.

Twice nominated for the Travelex Writer of the Year award, he won the Foreign Press Association prize for travel in 2002.

This is a wonderful piece of swashbuckling historical biography, which recalls the best and worst of the British imperial character.

Sir James Brooke’s curious career began in 1841 when he was caught up in a war in Brunei, which had started because a party of local Dayaks had refused to furl their umbrellas in the presence of the Sultan. With characteristic opportunism and the backing of the Sultan, Brooke made war on the Dayak tribespeople and eventually found himself ruling over the substantial kingdom of Sarawak. How he achieved this is a romantic, sometimes horrifying story.

Brooke was an extraordinary eminent Victorian, whose story was the stuff of legend and whose dynasty is remembered throughout South-East Asia. Seventy years after his death Errol Flynn wanted to play him in a movie, and his life was the basis for the novel Kalimantaan.