Sadly, more did not mean better. Newby's journalism got repetitive and, by the late 1980s, slapdash. People began to hint, and then to say out loud, that he was written out. He may have known this, yet could not stop writing. His last title, A Book of Lands and Peoples, appeared in 2003. This travelogue has some of the best anecdotes you could ask for. Misadventures galore. What were they thinking? Two out-of-shape pasty-pale gits thinking they could just stroll up the sides of Mt Everest? It's a wonder they weren't killed.

Trying to find their feet, they push themselves hard, and get upset stomachs and blisters. They find a man "with his skull smashed to pulp"; the head driver suggests they should leave the place immediately. Two lammergeiers, carrion feeders, circle overhead. [17] As oriental secretary in Iran (1956-58) at the time of Suez crisis, it was Carless's task to engage with the people and update the ambassador on Iran's social and political undercurrents; and, through him, the Foreign Office. Carless also encouraged the Shah to develop snow slopes near Tehran for skiing.

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Newby and Carless try to acclimatise to the altitude with a practice walk. They visit the Foreign Ministry, hire an Afghan cook, and buy a "very short" list of supplies. Newby describes the geography of Nuristan "walled in on every side by the most formidable mountains" and a little history, with the legend of descent from Alexander the Great, the British imperial adventures, and pre-war German expeditions. [14] I had the sensation of emerging from a country that would continue to exist more or less unchanged whatever disasters overtook the rest of mankind."

The witty narrative that is the first chapter had this reviewer enthralled and with that I was looking for words that were to describe my thoughts as to the magnificent adventure that Newby tells us. About how he and Carless do what to me is the unthinkable, walk to and then climb a mountain in a place that few Europeans had ever ventured at the time, the Hindu Kush. Carless is survived by his wife and by Ronnie, the elder of their two sons; the younger, Roger, predeceased him.The Austrian alpinist Adolf Diemberger wrote in a 1966 report that in mountaineering terms Newby and Carless's reconnaissance of the Central Hindu Kush was a "negligible effort", admitting however that they "almost climbed it". [47] The climb was more warmly described in the same year as "The first serious attempt at mountaineering in that country [the Afghan Hindu Kush]" by the Polish mountaineer Boleslaw Chwascinski. [5]