Sir Walter Raleigh Raleigh Trevelyan Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 622pp, £25 ISBN 071399326X

It was a pity that Sir Walter Raleigh did not make it into the top ten of the BBC's Great Britons, along with his contemporaries Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. He was, like Shakespeare, a brilliant writer, and like Elizabeth, a splendid dresser and crafty political manipulator. Many of his achievements are extremely topical. He twice crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean and South America - in 1595 and 1617, the second voyage aboard the all too aptly named Destiny - on the route recently traced by the lone yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur. During his years as a celebrity prisoner in the Tower of London, he wrote prolifically, compiling "Book I" of a huge History of the World that would have been a bestseller, had it not been suppressed by King James I.

Like today's celebrity prisoners, he was widely accused of being a liar, yet, as Raleigh Trevelyan's fascinating new biography shows, it is almost impossible to pin down the points where reportage becomes embroidery. Raleigh also invested in, even if he did not uniquely introduce, two commodities that are still very much with us: potatoes and tobacco. In one of several charming reminiscences, Trevelyan reports that on a "recent visit to Mexico City [he] was surprised to see RALEIGH blazed in huge red neon lights". He was told that this was an advertisement for a popular brand of cigarette.

Raleigh's powerful writings and achievements must indeed be ingested "con filtro". Despite his significant role in the early history of both Americas, we lack a comprehensive modern edition of his writings, letters, journals and poems. Trevelyan has had to make use of the Works, edited by Oldys and Birch as long ago as 1829. So wide is the range of Raleigh's interests, and so great the mass and textual complexity of his writings and life records, that only a team of specialist scholars with generous funding and lifetimes to spare could hope to complete such a project. No single author can ever represent the man in full.

Nevertheless, there is much here that is fresh, lively and illuminating. Trevelyan is particularly informative about places, whether in the West Country, London or the New World. I have never before seen it made so clear that Essex's raid on Cadiz was retribution for the Spanish raid on Penzance. He writes knowledgeably about Raleigh's acquisition of Sherborne Castle in Dorset and his struggles first to improve, and then to retain, the estate, and movingly about his eventual loss of it to Robert Carr in 1609. Carr, "a penniless young man from Roxburghshire", was a royal minion with nothing to recommend him but his looks, in contrast to Raleigh himself when he had captured Elizabeth's favour 35 years earlier. Raleigh's expeditions to Virginia, the Azores and Guiana are narrated with the support both of excellent maps and Trevelyan's first- hand observations, which often confirm Raleigh's accounts of landscape, wildlife and native practices. Most crucial to Raleigh's reputation is Trevelyan's verification of both silver workings and gold deposits close to where Raleigh claimed they were in Guiana. He corroborates Raleigh's report that the Spanish made few inroads beyond San Thome.

So was Raleigh a liar? He often exaggerated: for instance, when celebrating the Edenic abundance of Guiana in the hope of securing major investment. When facing death or disgrace, he often feigned illness and/or threatened suicide. Like most ambitious men of his time, he was happy to accept very large sums of money - once, fatally, in the form of a Spanish pension of £1,500 in return for "intelligence".

Yet, for the most part, he was not an unreliable chronicler of either events or places. While Trevelyan is at his best on Raleigh the explorer, his touch is slightly less sure in some other areas. Most of the shorter poems are cited in full, but his comments on them can be laconic. He is credulous about Raleigh's authorship of "The Lie" and "The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage". He is frankly perfunctory on the political discourses, "daunting stuff for the present-day reader", and philosophical essays, "some of them extremely hard going today". He is not - but then who could be? - master of every pertinent field of knowledge. For instance, he suggests that the "cloak enveloping his arms" alludes to - and thus confirms - the moment when the young Raleigh cast his own expensive, plush cloak over a muddy puddle to protect the queen's feet. He is apparently unaware that the image is a standard heraldic feature, known as "the mantling". He also says of the Welsh heiress, Raleigh's cousin, whom Philip Sidney's younger brother Robert married, that "she died soon after". In fact, like Raleigh's own marriage to Bess Throckmorton, Robert Sidney's marriage to Barbara Gamage was long, happy and fruitful, producing eight daughters and two sons. Yet despite the occasional blurred edges, this richly informative study is a splendid achievement.

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