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	Telegraph \| News \| Sir Wilfred Thesiger
		Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who died on Sunday aged 93, was the quintessential English explorer, and the last and greatest of that small band of travellers who sought out the secrets of the desert in the years before Arabia was transformed forever by the oil beneath her sands.
		Thesiger's achievement was to make longer journeys than either, dressed like the Arab tribesmen with whom he rode and rationed to their daily pint of water and handful of dates.
		Wilfred Thesiger was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holder of the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, of the Lawrence of Arabia Medal of the Royal Central Asian Society, of the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and of the Burton Memorial Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society.
	www.telegraph.co.uk /news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/08/26/db2601.xml (1659 words)

	BBC NEWS \| UK \| Obituary: Sir Wilfred Thesiger (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		In 1909, Thesiger's father was appointed British minister in charge of the legation at Addis Ababa.
		The young Thesiger was soon entranced by the place, revelling in the sights and sounds of everyday life.
		Wilfred Thesiger was one of the 20th century's greatest explorers, and his recollections influenced a generation of travel writers including Colin Thubron and Paul Theroux.
	news.bbc.co.uk /1/hi/uk/3180743.stm (549 words)

	FT.com / Arts & Weekend - Great escaper (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Thesiger spent his early years in Abyssinia as the son of the British consul-general, inordinately proud of his heritage and determined to distinguish himself.
		Thesiger is “the sort of man”, remarked a friend, “who will happily walk barefoot for months across a waterless desert, subsisting on a handful of dates and an occasional sip of camel’s piss, but who, back in civilisation, cannot endure the most trivial discomfort.
		Thesiger was a throwback to an earlier time, “a misfit”, wrote one of his rare employers, in the British colonial service, “only owing to excess of certain ancient virtues”.
	news.ft.com /cms/s/8a8bb316-a431-11da-897c-0000779e2340.html (1093 words)

	Wilfred Thesiger, author of "Arabian Sands" and other travel books
		Wilfred Thesiger remembers seeing Evelyn Waugh (then a correspondent for 'The Graphic') at the ceremony; but it was not a meeting of minds and Wilfred was angered by the flippant manner with which Waugh treated the coronation.
		Interestingly, it was not the physical hardship that Wilfred Thesiger found difficult to endure, even though the constant irritation of the wind-driven sand, the brackish water, the cold of night and the heat of day all took their toll.
		Wilfred Thesiger has been a visionary because he expressed such views when few doubted that the irrepressible march of science was for the ultimate benefit of all mankind.
	www.kruse.demon.co.uk /thesiger.htm (3012 words)

	Al-Ahram Weekly \| Books Supplement \| Wilfred Thesiger: Among the Arabs (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		The books' great weakness is that Thesiger himself came very much from the officer class, explaining both his sentimentality regarding the tribesmen among whom he traveled, as well as his barely veiled contempt for the urban middle classes, a source of what he came to feel was those tribesmen's corruption.
		Thesiger takes part in several pig- hunts, the wild boar living in the marshes being a menace both to crops and livestock, and he is soon in demand as a doctor.
		Thesiger writes of the new slum districts that were beginning to appear around the larger Iraqi towns, and especially around Baghdad, as a result of the ensuing scramble.
	weekly.ahram.org.eg /2003/660/bo4.htm (1278 words)

	Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Obituaries / Sir Wilfred Thesiger, 93; writer explored Africa, Arabia
		Sir Thesiger's most famous books were "Arabian Sands," about his travels with the Bedu people across the Empty Quarter of southern Arabia in the 1940s, and "The Marsh Arabs," the story of the Shi'ite marsh dwellers of southern Iraq, who later became a target of Saddam Hussein.
		Wilfred was 6 when he watched the victorious army of the emperor of Abyssinia return to Addis Ababa from battle against revolutionaries.
		Sir Thesiger was a tall, imposing man with a craggy face and a prominent nose broken early in life -- as a boxer at Oxford.
	www.boston.com /news/globe/obituaries/articles/2003/08/27/sir_wilfred_thesiger_93_writer_explored_africa_arabia (618 words)

	Arabian Sands
		Wilfred Thesiger was a threat to the Arabs and the Bedu whom he loved, for he made maps which would open up their land.
		Thesiger wrote, “While I was with the Arabs, I wished only to live as they lived, and now that I have left them, I would gladly think that nothing in their lives was altered by my coming.
		Wilfred wrote, “This was the Journey’s End that I had no desire to reach.” And with the assumption of the European dress and shaving his beard, he became estranged from his Bedu friends and rued this strangeness.
	www.storyfest.com /x10thesigerw1arabian.html (1955 words)

	Arts Unlimited \| Arts critics \| Profile of Wilfred Thesiger
		The modern world caught up with Thesiger and his younger brothers: Brian, a future regular army officer who served with distinction at Anzio and in Burma during the second world war; and Dermot, who took to the law after Oxford only to be killed as a newly commissioned pilot with RAF Coastal Command in 1941.
		Thesiger was to shoot big game and birds until 1960, when he realised that animals that had once been a threat to tribal farmers and their livestock were now in danger of extinction.
		Thesiger told Drabelle that he preferred the "ancient Greek ideal that the young male is the symbol of human beauty".
	arts.guardian.co.uk /critic/feature/0,1169,801993,00.html (3148 words)

	Saudi Aramco World : A Taste for Freedom (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Because Wilfred Thesiger ranks with such great 19th century explorers as Burton and Doughty, I was quite unprepared for the man I found camped by the blue soda waters of Lake Turkana in a bleak volcanic desert in Kenya.
		Thesiger is the world's last great traveler who can claim to have relied solely on non-mechanical, native means of transport; he walked, rode camels or, in the marshes, used reed boats.
		Thesiger is remarkable for his empathy with tribal people, his attachment to animals, his innate spiritual feeling for the controlling power of the land itself.
	www.saudiaramcoworld.com /issue/198104/a.taste.for.freedom.htm (3951 words)

	A disciple of the desert and its people - smh.com.au
		Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who has died aged 93, was the quintessential English explorer, and the last and greatest of that small band of travellers who sought out the secrets of the desert in the years before Arabia was transformed forever by the oil beneath her sands.
		Thesiger's achievement was to make longer journeys than both, dressed like the Arab tribesmen with whom he rode and rationed to their daily half-litre of water and handful of dates.
		Thesiger, though, was not a sentimental man, and subsequently shot both the cubs because he believed they would grow up to become man-eaters.
	www.smh.com.au /articles/2003/08/29/1062050676045.html (1840 words)

	Blog of Death: Wilfred Thesiger
		Thesiger was born in the British Legation in Addis Ababa, where his father was British Minister at the court of the Emperor of Abyssinia.
		Thesiger was probably the last living member of the late 19th and early 20th century culture of explorers who are rarely celebrated in our current conservative popular culture.
		Thesiger, like other explorers, understood that it was the exploration of the aesthetic that motivates travellers and that exploration requires work and, often, deprivation.
	www.blogofdeath.com /archives/000258.html (533 words)

	Exploring a modern legend: The life of Wilfred Thesiger : Book Review : Features : DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE (The Daily ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Wilfred Thesiger, who died in 2003, was the last of the great British adventurer-explorers, a tall, craggy individual with "a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands," who eschewed the trappings of modernity in favor of traditional tribal lifestyles in Africa and the Middle East that had remained unchanged for millennia.
		Thesiger's writings and photographs are well known among those with an interest in the Middle East, and as many of his books are autobiographical it might be thought that there is little to add to his life story.
		The Thesiger that came across in previously published writings was a natural gang leader, "hard as nails," who preferred the camel to the motor car, who thought little of crossing the world's most desolate desert with minimal supplies and who preferred befriending native tribesmen to socializing with his countrymen.
	www.yomiuri.co.jp /dy/features/book/20060423TDY20001.htm (1098 words)

	Telegraph \| Opinion \| A maverick species has died out with Wilfred Thesiger (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Thesiger and his peers were brilliant amateurs, and their example endures.
		Thesiger was superbly well-connected - the nephew of the Viceroy of India - but he was shaped by his upbringing at the court of the Emperor Menelik of Abyssinia.
		Thesiger, an explorer and anthropologist, wrote his first travel book, Arabian Sands, in 1959 when he was almost 50.
	www.telegraph.co.uk /opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/08/27/do2701.xml (828 words)

	Wanderlust - Profile: Wilfred Thesiger (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Thesiger was born in 1910 in Addis Ababa – his father was in charge of the British Legation there.
		Thesiger returned with life (and genitalia) intact and went to work as an assistant district commissioner in Sudan.
		Thesiger’s writing style was like the desert landscapes that he loved so much – spare and pure, beautiful on its own terms.
	www.wanderlust.co.uk /features/feat60a.html (649 words)

	Guardian Unlimited \| Obituaries \| Wilfred Thesiger
		As an explorer, Thesiger, who has died aged 93, recognised that satisfaction in attaining a goal was directly in proportion to the hardship and challenge involved in getting there.
		Thesiger gained his own blue, for boxing at Oxford, and like many an athletically talented young Oxbridge graduate of the 30s, sought a career in the country where "blues" were said to rule "fls": the Sudan.
		Arabia's legendary Empty Quarter had been the goal of all Arabian explorers from Richard Burton onward and, although Thesiger was not the first to cross it, he was the first to explore it thoroughly, mapping the oasis of Liwa and the quicksands of Umm As Sam.
	www.guardian.co.uk /obituaries/story/0,3604,1029590,00.html (1088 words)

	Guardian Unlimited Books \| Obituaries \| Obituary: Sir Wilfred Thesiger
		But Africa was his goal, and at the age of only 23 he went to explore Abyssinia's Awash River and the forbidding Aussa sultanate with its Danakil nomads, chiefly noted for a disturbing tendency to kill men and carry off their testicles as trophies.
		Such practices held little horror for Thesiger, who had survived fagging and flogging at Eton, and saw at least one young Afar man, flushed from the exertion of slaughtering and mutilating four victims in a day, as "the equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for cricket".
		Arabia's legendary Empty Quarter had been the goal of all Arabian explorers from Richard Burton onward, and although Thesiger was not the first to cross it, he was the first to explore it thoroughly, mapping the oasis of Liwa and the quicksands of Umm As-Sammim.
	books.guardian.co.uk /obituaries/story/0,11617,1030132,00.html (1555 words)

	Embassy Regrets Death of Sir Wilfred Thesiger
		Wilfred Patrick Theseger was born on 3 June 1910 within the mud walls of the British Legation in Addis Ababa in a building which is still in use today.
		Billy, as Wilfred was known in his young days, spent his first seven years in Ethiopia, absorbing a spectacle of savage splendour that bred in him his lifelong craving for adventure.
		In May 1994 Thesiger led a flying column which marched 50 miles in a day through sweltering heat to harry a much larger retreating force at Wagidj.
	www.addistribune.com /Archives/2003/09/05-09-03/Embassy.htm (503 words)

	Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Wilfred Thesiger never imagined he would write about his experiences out in the sands of Arabia.
		Thesiger arrived in Arabia “..only just in time.” He was absorbed with the traditional way of life of the Bedouin and in his five years there travelled some ten thousand miles by camel.
		Thesiger sought to be accepted by the Bedouin and so dressed as they did and adapted his classical Arabic as best he could.
	www.roadjunky.com /greats/arabiasands.shtml (1259 words)

	:::::: Welcome to Booksarabia :::::: (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Sir Wilfred Thesiger is considered to be the last of the great explorers; he is also one of the finest living travel writers.
		Wilfred Thesiger spent his early childhood in Abyssinia, a country utterly remote from the modern world.
		Thesiger has always regarded his five years with the Bedu in Arabia as the most important and rewarding years of his life.
	www.booksarabia.com /product_display.asp?PD_ID=160 (281 words)

	BOOKFORUM \| spring 2004
		Wilfred Thesiger hated cars, so it's somehow fitting that the adventure and travel writer's masterpiece was set in the one part of the world more instrumental than even Detroit in advancing the career of the motor engine.
		Thesiger's, however, is the plain style, simple, direct, and his great subject is neither heroism as such nor even endurance, but attention.
		And yet, as Thesiger knew as well as any outsider, the material existence of the Bedu is almost entirely contingent on factors outside their control, especially sun, water, and grazing land for their animals.
	www.bookforum.com /archive/spr_04/smith.html (1531 words)

	BBC NEWS \| Have Your Say \| Sir Wilfred Thesiger: Your tributes (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Thesiger's most famous books were "Arabian Sands" about his travels with the Bedu people across the Empty Quarter of southern Arabia in the 1940s, and "The Marsh Arabs" the story of the Shiite marsh dwellers of southern Iraq.
		Thesiger's writings and the travel writing of others that I was subsequently led to read impressed upon me the beauty of leaving the well trodden path and the need to appreciate human diversity without the judgmental approach that the western observer is so often inclined to adopt.
		Thesiger's books, particularly Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, greatly influenced me as a young man to travel in the Middle East, to learn Arabic, to get to know and appreciate the Arab culture, and, of course, to learn to love the desert and its people, especially in North Africa and the Arabian peninsula.
	news.bbc.co.uk /1/hi/talking_point/3182099.stm (1523 words)

	Wilfred Thesiger - Great Travelers
		By many considered the last of the great explorers, Wilfred Thesiger died in 2003 at the age of 93 in an old folks home in sleep Surrey, England.
		The irony was not lost on a man who had become the first European to fully explore the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert, live for seven years with the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq and travel extensively with the nomads of Kurdistan, Iran and Afghanistan.
		Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and though he attended school in England, his heart was still roaming the plains of Africa where he had spent his early years.
	www.roadjunky.com /greats/thesiger.shtml (930 words)

	Outside Online Archives \| Outside Online
		Thesiger fusses over his meal of fish and chips — "I don't know why they fill your plate so full," he mutters — and sends me bouncing up and down to fetch salt, tartar sauce, and finally a second plate to give his food more room.
		Thesiger had set his sights on a life of "colour and savagery, hardship and adventure," and in 1946, gazing down on the Empty Quarter's vast dunes from the mountains to the west, he found its ultimate form.
		Thesiger insists his admiration was always Platonic, and I don't doubt him, but it's hard not to draw a connection between his asexuality — or, if you prefer, his impeccably controlled homoeroticism — and the loneliness, the life sentence of apartness he often writes and speaks about.
	outside.away.com /outside/magazine/1098/9810frontier.html (3431 words)

	Guardian Unlimited Travel \| Travel light \| Obituary: Sir Wilfred Thesiger
		Once, in 1946, Wilfred Thesiger lay starving on a sand dune in Arabia's Empty Quarter for three days, waiting for his Bedu companions to bring back food, and tortured by hallucinations of cars and lorries that could carry him to safety.
		Thesiger felt least at home in his own culture and with his own kind.
		Thesiger's best years were the five he spent among the Bedu of South Arabia, and one cherished companion from those days, Salim bin Ghabeisha, when a greybeard in his 60s, remembered him: "He was loyal, generous, and afraid of nothing.
	travel.guardian.co.uk /feature/0,8806,1030122,00.html (1555 words)

	A Vanished World (Main Page) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Wilfred Thesiger's photography career started during a hunting expedition to Ethiopia at age twenty.
		The visual drama of Arabia's deserts was the backdrop to Thesiger's emergence as a master of the portrait.
		Wilfred Thesiger's extraordinary journeys have won him the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Burton Memorial Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society.
	www.wwnorton.com /catalog/spring02/005086.htm (215 words)

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