Tom Harrisson was one of the most extraordinary Englishmen of the twentieth century. He is best known nowadays for founding Mass Observation, the pioneering social survey organisation that before the war, in documenting the daily lives of ordinary British people, effectively invented the modern discipline of market research and many of the principles of modern sociology – while at the same time helping to compile a priceless archive of social history, and most famously of how Londoners coped during the Blitz.

But his remarkable life is also notable for achievements across a dizzyingly wide field. As much as anyone, he is responsible for conceiving the modern (and hugely popular) pastime of birdwatching – whose techniques of close observation and scrupulous record he was subsequently to use on his human subjects in mass observation. Fresh from university in Cambridge, where his hell-raising contemporaries included the novelist Malcom Lowery, he took himself off to the South-Pacific, where over the years he did groundbreaking work in anthropology, palaeontology and protecting rare animals like the orang-utan from extinction. His wartime career, with the SOE, was superbly distinguished, as he led a team parachuting into Borneo and collaborating with the local headhunters to kill or capture thousands of Japanese – a feat which won him the DSO. He also found time during his hectic life to make documentary films for the BBC, become the curator of a museum in Sarawak, and climb a hitherto unconquered mountain.

Tom Harrisson also made a name for himself as one of the most mercurial, difficult and self-destructive individuals there can ever have been – for those who worked with him, fell in love with him or just tried to be his friend, decidedly dangerous to know. Judith Heimann, who came to know Harrisson well during his later years in Borneo, has now written the first comprehensive biography of this exotic and outrageous man, a superb work of scholarship and quite simply the gripping – and occasionally hilarious – life story of someone who did enough living for several people, and who in numerous ways changed the world we live in.