“Nick was born in Gloucestershire, the son of the naturalist and explorer Sandy Wollaston, doctor and botanist on the first Everest expedition in 1921 […] A forebear was the eminent early 19th-century chemist William Hyde Wollaston.    […]

    “Wollaston also published seven novels. They contain passages of vivid and imaginative writing — the physical and mental trauma of being stuck in an Alpine crevasse in Jupiter Laughs (1967), the lovingly clinical account of a devout Indian bathing and self-administering an enema in Pharaoh’s Chicken (1969), […] the horrors of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in The Stones of Bau (1987), possibly his finest novel — and they were well received.    […]

    “The publisher who said he was incapable of a dull sentence and the reviewer who described his writing as ‘refreshing as a cool wind to a sweat-soaked wayfarer’ were right. Wollaston was a consummate stylist — the briefest book review in the Observer was perfectly shaped — yet what he wrote never suggested the careful polishing that undoubtedly went into it; it was supremely natural.”