Rory Stewart has been the UK's Environment Minister, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Minister of State for Justice and Secretary of State for International Development. Following a very brief period in the British Army, he served as a British diplomat in Indonesia, the Balkans and Iraq, establishing and running a charity in Afghanistan, and holding a chair at Harvard University.
Rory has lived in the Eden Valley of Cumbria for ten years, serving as the Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Border - the largest and most sparsely populated constituency in England - much of which he explored on foot. Half Scottish and half English, he spent his childhood between Britain, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
His 21-month 6,000-mile walk across Asia, including Afghanistan, is recorded in his New York Times bestseller The Places in Between. His other books include Occupational Hazards, The Marches, and Politics on the Edge, which was a number one Sunday Times bestseller.
He is now the Brady-Johnson Professor of the Practice of Grand Strategy at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs, and the co-host, with Alastair Campbell, of the UK's leading podcast The Rest Is Politics.
Rory joins us for his new book Middleland: Dispatches from the Borders.
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Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as a MP of Britain's most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape, its rugged history as a frontierland, and in the spirit of its people.
Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, Middleland is an unforgettable portrait of rural Britain today - a place caught in tensions between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, between local and national politics - as well as a timeless evocation of the history, people and landscape of Cumbria.