Jack of all trades - and his family

Book excerpt: Born into privilege, Peter Inchbald was an intellectual who spent the latter part of World War II as an Army Captain and the sole white man for miles around in the foothills of the Karakorums and the Himalaya. He became a minor artist of the postwar era before becoming an equally minor industrialist who helped bring modern design to the silverware and cutlery trade. Later in life he published a series of detective stories. There are really three books in here. The first is a personal memoir, the second a family history - an Appendix provides several family trees. The third is a serious record, full of fascinating historical detail. Inchbald wrote his memoir for many kinds of reader, from those who knew him intimately to distant cousins who had never heard of him and people, some not yet born, to whom he is a dim figure from the past.