Creative genius, war artist, adventurer, lover. These are just some of the words that can be used to describe Aberdeenshire-born painter and printmaker James McBey (1883-1959). McBey was a Scottish superstar amongst the creative spirits that fuelled the Etching Revival of the late nineteenth century and Etching Boom of the early twentieth century, and in an historical context, was the acknowledged heir to Whistler and Rembrandt. But after his death in Tangier, Morocco, in 1959, his renown as one of Britain's most accomplished artists - who took the art world by storm - faded from public consciousness. Born illegitimately in the tiny parish of Foveran, Aberdeenshire, in the late Victorian era, he was brought up by his blind mother and elderly grandmother amid the rigid Presbyterian confines of Scotland's north-east. Tragedy, dreary work as a bank clerk and a craving for success on his own terms all precipitated his leaving Aberdeen to live the life of an artist in London where he quickly became one of the most-talked about creatives of his generation. At the heart of this biography - the first ever to be published on McBey - is his time as a war artist in the Middle East during the Great War - where he would meet and paint T. E. Lawrence - his many love affairs, marriage to the beautiful American, Marguerite Loeb, and his enduring passion for Morocco. Drawing on his many diaries and letters and artistic creations, this is the story of one man who - clever, kind, intrepid, dashing, insecure and flawed - triumphed against the odds.

In 1940, John Archibald McKenzie Rillie - serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps and newly married to Betty - was posted to the African city of Freetown in Sierra Leone. This is the first publication of the writing and the poems, drawn in the main from his diary and the notebook in which he collated much of his war-time verse, that mark his experiences in the sixteen months that followed. In the words of his editor, and grandson, Alasdair Soussi, it is an 'expressive, outspoken, sometimes raw and uncomfortable account of a bygone age'. The later reflections of Jack Rillie, the by then greatly admired and influential university teacher, on this period - and on his life prior to the war - are presented in a brief introduction, "A Young Life Recalled". With a foreword by Andrew Hook and an afterword from Marshall Walker; reproductions of photographs and letters; and even a list of books Jack read while in Sierra Leone, the man who inspired so many is revealed both for his formidable scholarship and his love.