Stanley's story begins with a loud bang - when his father crash-lands a Wellington bomber on a Devon airfield. It's the Second World War and the young Stanley Johnson is growing up on an Exmoor sheep-farm.
Stanley would keep his links with this much-loved rural idyll throughout his life - while going on to become an explorer‚ author‚ occasional politician and also one of the world's first environmentalists. A sparkling raconteur and experienced thriller writer‚ in STANLEY I PRESUME great stories are told in great style.
On leaving school in 1958 Stanley travelled alone through South America - hitching rides across the jungle on Brazilian Air Force planes - and shortly afterwards he rode a motorcycle 4‚000 miles from London to Afghanistan‚ tracing the route of Marco Polo with two friends.
After winning Oxford University's poetry prize with a love poem - written following a hilltop tryst in the West Country - Stanley went on to do various adventurous jobs‚ before working for the billionaire John D Rockefeller‚ the World Bank‚ the United Nations and the European Union.
Stanley married and started a family young - Boris was born in New York when his father was 23 - and while Boris would go on to become big news‚ the family's forbears provide quite a story‚ as Stanley finds out.
For the Johnson family's roots are not just in the West Country‚ but in Turkey too - where‚ as Stanley discovers‚ his politician grandfather Ali Kemal was torn to pieces by an angry mob. Stanley visits a Turkish village where the locals are blonde - later he learns that he and Boris are direct descendants of George II.
