Maximum Fiennes

I find it difficult to remember, in retrospect, why I thought it would impress Ranulph Fiennes – a man who has crossed the Antarctic unaided and who sawed the ends off his own, frostbitten fingers – if I arrived to interview him on a bicycle. I could have gone by cab and been waiting calmly in the foyer of the Lanesborough Hotel by 8 a.m. Instead, I pitch up at 8.15 with black particles of diesel exhaust stuck to my puce face.

‘Sorry I’m late, I came by bicycle,’ I explain to a tall, middle-aged man with a fine-boned, urgent-looking face like a pencil sketch. Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, Bt, OBE stares at me with a polite but total lack of interest.

As we sit across the breakfast table from each other, previous articles about him suddenly make sense. ‘Not an easy interview,’ said the Guardian last year. ‘Strangely passionless,’ said Scotland on Sunday. ‘Like stirring the void with a teaspoon,’ concluded Anthony Clare after interrogating him for In the Psychiatrist’s Chair. If people who are eager to please are very present in their eyes, Fiennes is looking at me from the other end of a mile-long tunnel. He has admitted to treating interviews as a game in which he must not reveal too much. He has the unfair advantage of SAS training.

One subject during the course of our conversation brings him out of his tunnel: Scott of the Antarctic. This year Fiennes has devoted himself to writing a biography that will overturn the 20-year orthodoxy that Captain Scott was a failure. The polar historian Roland Huntford, in his Scott and Amundsen of 1979, was the first to present Scott as an anti-hero. He calls him ‘stupid’ and ‘recklessly incompetent’, ‘a monument to sheer ambition and bull-headed persistence’. It is now received wisdom that, far from being a model of British fortitude and valour, Scott was a bully who endangered his men’s lives by relying on old-fashioned methods for the sake of his vanity.