As you get older you start feeling a responsibility to preserve what you know about family history and this is why Michael Palin felt he he had to write the story of his Great Uncle Harry. Some years ago an elderly cousin of his father passed on to Palin a box of photographs and papers that had come from down from her grandparents (his great grandparents), and as she had no children, she gave it to him to keep it in the family. For a long time everything just sat in a box as there were other more pressing projects to deal with, but when working on a documentary about the last days of the First World War, Palin found his great uncle's name carved on a memorial at the site of the Somme battlefields. When he discovered that there was no grave to visit and Harry's final resting place was 'Known Only Unto God', he knew he had to know more. Writing a book like this is a lot harder than it looks because the old family notebooks and papers only gave the bare outli...