Amery, L. S. -- (Leopold Stennett), 1873-1955 -- Travel, Outdoor life, Mountaineering, Voyages and travels, Travel 

To the world at large, Mr. Amery is best known as a strenuous and fearless politician, as a capable administrator, and as a prolific writer. In our domestic policies, he has figured chiefly as the most active and consistent exponent, on the platform and in print, of the policy of protection and Imperial Preference initiated by oseph Chamberlain. The army thinks of him as the author of the standard history of the South African War and as a leader, both before the Great War and since, in the advocacy of universal military training. The Navy looks back to him as, with the late Lord Beatty, responsible for the initiation of the Singapore Base.

What he has hitherto concealed has been another life, entirely separate from his public activities, and snatched in unsuspected intervals, devoted to open-air sports and adventures of all kinds, but especially to mountaineering, and to travel all over the world. It is an autobiography of his private life that he has now published in Days of Fresh Air. There are chapters of mountaineering adventure in the Alps, the Rockies and the South African Drakensberg. Other chapters tell of the thrills of rapids run in the Grand Canyon of the Fraser or in the ravines of Montenegro, or of a canoe trip to Hudson Bay. There are wanderings through old0time Serbia, Macedonia and Asia Minor, including the priceless narrative of one joyous and irresponsible journey with F. E. Smith, afterwards Lord Birkenhead. There is the gay tale of the author's short0lived career as chief British War Correspondent with the Boer forces, and of his subsequent midnight ride through the tents of his former hosts. Here and there in the South African chapters, the story touches on politics, as in his account of the inner history of the Boer ultimatum, or of the quarrel, at Paardeberg, between Lord Roberts and the Cavalry, which was destined to have such fatal results on our leadership in the Great War. But in the main these chapters, like the rest of the volume, are confined to the open air. The whole constitutes a joyous Odyssey of some ten years of wandering and adventure, told with unfailing zest, delightful humour, and with an intense love of the beauty of the world. A book to inspire the young and delight the old.