Baden-Powell

Baden-Powell by Tim Jeal. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780091706708.

R.S.S. Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts movement in 1908, was a British military hero during the Boer War and an author, actor, artist, spy, sportsman, and female impersonator. In this absorbing and humane account of Baden-Powells extraordinary life, Tim Jeal reveals for the first time the complex figure behind the saintly public mask, showing him to be a man of both dazzling talents and crippling secret fears. Reviews of the earlier edition: "Baden-Powells life story is as rich and engrossing as any of his memorable campfire yarns... a monumental biography." (Zara Steiner, New York Times Book Review); "In an age of good biographies, here is one that deserves to be called great... a magnificent book." (Piers Brendon, Mail on Sunday); "Jeals Baden-Powell is brave and self-seeking, devious and honorable, a domestic paragon whose repressed homosexuality fired his career, a soldier of genius who ultimately rejected militarism... The story that Tim Jeal has to tell is epic, funny, and touching." (Philip Oakes, New Statesman); "Superb." (Ian Buruma, New York Review of Books).