As a submariner, I rose (or sank) to the rank of First Lieutenant.  Having questioned why on water are the British in the Pacific, I resigned in 1970, to then teach maths and physics in Nairobi.  Three years later, I cycled across Central Africa and then, this child of an English Catholic mum and Irish Protestant dad went to Belfast, where he soon got engaged in the Peace Process.

"Are you Protestant or Catholic?" he was often asked.  "Are you communist or capitalist?" was another dichotomy of those days.  So in 1983, he started to learn Russian; five years later, he got a job as a translator in Moscow, where he wrote in Moscow News and, alongside Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in Russia's leading literary journal, Novy Mir.

In 1991, he published his first book on consensus voting, a samizdat.  In the same year, he organised a cross-community conference in Belfast with electronic preferential voting, with Michael D Higgins as the key-note speaker, and with a guest from Sarajevo.  Bosnia, after all, was 40:30:20 Moslem:Orthodox:Catholic; there was no majority; but the EU (EC) insisted on a [majority vote] referendum; March 1992; it started the war.  So in December, he returned to the Balkans to cycle across Bosnia, twice, in winter and in war.  Majoritarianism doesn't work well there either.

Later on, he realised that the voting procedure he used had been invented in 1770 by Jean-Charles de Borda.  So with colleagues from Belfast and Dublin, he set up the de Borda Institute in 1997.  He now publishes with Springer, and most recently, he has been working in China.