“Why isn’t her face on a bank note yet?” is one of several slack-jawed questions you’ll ask yourself when reading about Alexandra David-Neel, the Franco-Belge éxploratrice whose life reads like an Oscar-winning film. She was an opera singer, and an anarchist; a student of philosophy, feminism and (rumoured) seductress of monks. And when she wasn’t meeting in secret to help the exiled Dalai Lama, she was catching rays at her “fortress of meditation” in the South of France, reflecting on what her journeys east could teach her next. That’s Alexandra in a nutshell: a life divided between the zen, and the fabulous.
