The master storyteller, Jim Curran, has finally produced the biggest story he can tell. For readers of his previous books it is full of surprises, conundrums and split lives. Teaching in Bristol during the week, he lived a different life in Sheffield at weekends. A teacher of art, he developed a career as a mountaineering filmmaker before realising that he'd always wanted to be a painter. And this great humorist turns out to be an intermittent sufferer from depression. The warmest of people, as his characterisation of his friends here demonstrates, he reveals a strand of loneliness throughout his life. By turns this book is hilarious and heart-breaking, anecdotal and reflective, sociable and self-doubting. Its drive for honesty is as unwavering as its eye for a self-deflating story. As a rigorous self-portrait its impact lingers beyond the words, the pencil and the paint. Jim Curran has climbed worldwide for exactly half a century with many of the leading lights of mountaineering - Chr