"I cannot escape excitement. If I touch a bath heater, it blows up. If I go swimming, I am carried away by the tide. If I go into a restaurant which has had a blameless reputation for 100 years, someone chooses that day to shoot himself at a table. If I go on a yacht, it sinks. I am a sensational newspaper reporter who has missed his vocation." In these words Sir Michael Bruce, 11th Baronet of Stenhouse and Airth, a descendant of Robert the Bruce, and of the Royal Stuarts, sums up his life of adventure across the world.

In sixty years he has crammed into his life a variety of thrilling experiences:  At seventeen he shot his first man; at eighteen he hunted a double-murderer across Rhodesia; by the time he was twenty-four he had fought at Gallipoli and through the Great War of 1914-18. He sailed round the Horn in a windjammer; fought in a revolution; walked across the Andes; defeated a group of unscrupulous rogues to save a friend's business; was nearly killed in a stampede of wild cattle; was the sole survivor of a gold-seeking hunt in the Amazon; and rescued Jews from the clutches of Hitler.

This is the exciting autobiography of a man who packed more incidents into his life than most men dream about.