When Newby, improbably earing his living in the London 'haute couture' trade, sent his fateful cable - "Can You Travel Nuristan June?" - it was the first step in a classic journey, from Mayfair to the wild mountains of the Hindu Kush, north-east of Kabul. As a more recent generation of travellers has discovered, Afghanistan can be an inhospitable place; as this truly diverting and wonderfully evocative book shows, it is also one of the most spectacularly beautiful wilderness on earth.
