O.G.S Crawford seems to be an example of the eccentric English expert, someone who achieves relative success in an esoteric or overlooked field, but carries along with them a number of personality or character faults that often serve to distance them from the rest of conventional society.

Significantly, Crawford was the first to realize that aircraft could be used to survey tracts land for signs and evidence of prehistoric settlements. He also seems to have rubbed people the wrong way and made some poor choices in ideology along the way as well.

A new biography, Bloody Old Britain, presents a comprehensive look at his life, and has been reviewed extensively by the British press.

Eccentrics often produce the best biographies - and the best book reviews - because they are apt to channel their emotion and their obsessions into witty and observant statements, like:

“bungaloid eruptions” - the suburban homes that began to dot and then overwhelm the English landscape in the years after World War Two.

As reviewer Luke Slattery describes Crawford, “He was not so much a whingeing Pom as a splenetic Basil Fawlty, animated by a generalised anger, set at a sharp angle to the world.”