When he died in 1996, Laurens van der Post was a celebrated polymath: war-hero, writer, explorer, mystic, Jungian, behind-the-scenes diplomat and sage to Mrs Thatcher and Prince Charles. He was a secular saint.

After this biography, Post should be most famous for one skill: storytelling. His books and stories (of the bushmen of the Kalahari, of his friendship with Jung, of his diplomatic importance) may be inspiring. They are also largely fabricated. Jones' account reveals Post as enchanting, ambiguous, inspiring, complex, misleading, sometime admirable, sometimes risable - and sometimes as a shockingly culpable fabulist and liar.

"After his death doubts soon began to spread as to whether this story presented a true picture. Was his knowledge of the Kalahari Bushmen, whom he prized as the last example of all that is untainted in humanity, as extensive as he led us to believe, and did the Bushman stories he so loved to tell come mainly from books? His standing as some kind of secular saint certainly suffered with the emergence of an illegitimate daughter whose mother he had seduced when she was 14. And his claim to have effectively brokered the Lancaster House agreement on Zimbabwean independence was deflated by those who had actually been there. His intimacy with C. G. Jung has also to be qualified."