Populist preaching
Patrick Marnham visits Brazil’s annual festival of literature Many years ago a wild-eyed Englishman hacked his way into the Amazon rain forest and disappeared, never to be seen again. Since then the fate of Percy Fawcett, known as ‘the Colonel’, has remained a mystery. Fawcett, a heavily bearded pipe-smoker in a deerstalker hat, was a figure of fun to the bright young things of England in the 1920s. This was unfair since he was engaged in work of some importance; he was mapping the Brazilian frontier with Bolivia and Peru. Colonel Fawcett returned to the Amazon many times and over the years, distracted from his science, he became convinced of