Kuala Lumpur

I dropped into Malaysia armed with F. Spencer Chapman’s anti-Japanese guerrilla war memoir The Jungle is Neutral and took his words to heart. ‘It is the attitude of mind that determines whether you go under or survive. There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ Chapman survived the jungle’s ‘green hell’ — of blackwater fever, leeches, beriberi, sores, the Nips and a starvation diet of tapioca and rat (which he says is better than chicken) — for more than three years.