Matthew Leeming was a scholarly adventurer, brought down by an anarchic, self-destructive streak. By his friend Bijan Omrani
The word ‘tragic’ is often misused nowadays. It’s fitting to apply it to the life of my friend and literary collaborator Matthew Leeming, who died at the end of November at the early age of 58. Matthew’s life was tragic in the Greek sense of the word, with a descent from a high estate down to the depths. As an Oxford undergraduate, he shared a house with Boris Johnson, and was regarded as one of the most brilliant and promising members of a gilded generation there in the mid-1980s. In the early 2000s, thanks to his work in Afghanistan he was fêted as the next big thing in travel writing – as if ‘Hunter S Thompson meets Robert Byron’, one critic said. Yet he was not simply a man of letters. He was also an irrepressible entrepreneur. Every time you saw him, he was on the trail of a new...
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