Stanley2 story begins with a loud bang - when his father crash-lands a Wellington bomber on a Devon airfield. It2 the Second World War and the young Stanley Johnson is growing up on an Exmoor sheep-farm. Stanley would keep his links with this much-loved rural idyll throughout his life - while going on to become an explorer, author, occasional politician and also one of the world2 first environmentalists. On leaving school in 1958 Stanley travelled alone through South America - hitching rides across the jungle on Brazilian Air Force planes - and shortly afterwards he rode a motorcycle 4,000 miles from London to Afghanistan, tracing the route of Marco Polo with two friends. After winning Oxford University2 poetry prize with a love poem - written following a hilltop tryst in the West Country - Stanley went on to do various adventurous jobs, before working for the billionaire John D Rockefeller, the World Bank, the United Nations and the European Union. Stanley married and started a family young - Boris was born in New York when his father was 23 - and while Boris would go on to become big news, the family2 forbears provide quite a story, as Stanley finds out. For the Johnson family2 roots are not just in the West Country, but in Turkey too - where, as Stanley discovers, his politician grandfather Ali Kemal was torn to pieces by an angry mob. Stanley visits a Turkish village where the locals are blonde - later he learns that he and Boris are direct descendants of George II of England.
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