No modern French writer has aroused as much passion as Andre Malraux, who combined a life of action worthy of Indiana Jones with a political and literary career of extreme controversy. His capture, after a spectacular temple-robbery in Cambodia, made him a left-wing cause celebre and established his opposition to colonial regimes. In the Spanish civil war he led a flamboyant air squadron, and later he became one of De Gaulle's strongest supporters, and was often seen as a traitor to his revolutionary ideals. Literary intellectual, dealer in erotica, financial spectulator, admirer of Trotsky, winner of the Prix Goncourt for La Condition Humaine, a man with a complex and tragic private life, Malraux was in every way larger than life.