Cue the Tom Lehrer Music...

Elleke Boehmer, a professor of (post-)colonialist studies at Nottingham Trent who's just edited the Oxford University Press critical edition of Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys, shares her favorite bits with Guardian readers.

It would be difficult to avoid mentioning B-P's famous predilection for sleeping out as he did - alone, virtually all his married life - as well as his aversion to anything, including "rich food", that might produce sexual stimulation. However he believed in speaking frankly to boys about the "dangers of self-abuse", more frankly than his first publishers believed acceptable at the time.