At six years old, he tore a picture from a magazine, a little white house fringed with coconut palms and stuck it to his bedhead.

Son of a clergyman and a playwright, Bob studied fine arts in London, was sculptor on Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey, a war cameraman in the Middle East and a BBC TV correspondent in Brazil. During the making of more than four hundred documentaries, he broke bread with rich and poor, poets and gangsters, cowboys, ministers, thinkers, musicians, generals and mothers of the tortured. He wandered through dazzling palaces and the rubble of destroyed civilisations. Longing to return to painting, he opted to build a studio home in a Rio favela. Underneath he created a community centre with adult literacy schooling and a free pre-natal clinic followed by an art gallery.