Professor Sir Richard Sorabji's biography of his uncle Allan Monkhouse, the pioneering engineer, begins in his boyhood in the New Zealand bush servicing one of its earliest hydro-electric generators. He went on to work in Russia under the Tsars, and then the Russian revolution, standing beside Lenin in 1917 as he announced his programme, surviving a death sentence and escaping through Siberia. He switched on, under Trotsky, five of the world’s biggest electric generating plants, at one point saving Trotsky's life, until he was arrested by Stalin on a faked charge of sabotage. Called to India after retirement, he convinced Prime Minister Nehru that India’s water power could be increased twelve-fold, and then that the micro-generator he had designed could bring electricity across the Himalayas. He installed the first thirty of a total which by 2014 service an estimated 105,000 Himalayan villages. 

'"I went at night with my Maori co-workers to be initiated into the secret of spearing eels. This involved floating noiselessly downstream, lying in the bow of a dugout canoe, with a glowing stick in one hand and a barbed spear in the other. In our camp eels were a regular item of diet. On our return upstream, we all paddled our canoes to the accompaniment of Maori songs. Even at the age of thirteen,​I came to appreciate the beauty of the songs."'

'When the train pulled into Liverpool Street in London, cine cameras, lights and microphones had been placed on raised platforms at the exact spot where Allan would draw up and where his family were waiting with the Chairman of Metrovickers, Sir Felix Pole. The great crowd broke out with the National Anthem, and Allan was reminded of being greeted by the same anthem
​on his arrival in Vladivostok 15 years earlier.​'

'On this Christmas day at lunch time, he found in the newspaper an advertisement placed under the auspices of the Colombo Plan for economic development in South Asia. An engineer was needed to advise the newly independent Government of India on harnessing the waters of the entire system of Indian rivers. Allan applied and was offered the job. He sailed on July 1st 1952, at the age of 64.'