Meet
Fergus dunlop
at the Guernsey Literary Festival 2021
- Title: Could a classic Bentley circumnavigate the Med?
- Date: Tuesday 27th April, Time 18:00–19:00
- Venue: Guille-Alles Library, St Peter Port
- Admission: Free
- Fergus will be interviewed about his circumnavigation of the Mediterranean in a 1957 Bentley, 30 years ago, and the subsequent multi-decade journey to publication.


The Lady With No Name
Part One of the Borderline Pass trilogy
The year is 1988. The Cold War is ending. Europe’s near-abroad unlocks. And a thirty-year-old Londoner attempts a road trip from France to western Turkey in a vintage Bentley, the book’s eponymous heroine (if having no name can be an eponym).
Their journey unfolds into a circumnavigation of the Mediterranean Sea.
The car’s heroic skittishness is a source of comedy and woe, easing the author’s frustration with his non-committal girlfriend back home.
This book will appeal to adventurers and travelers, to students of human nature and late twentieth-century European history, to classic car enthusiasts and petrol-heads, and to all who enjoy a gripping story.
As Part One of Fergus’ Borderline Pass travelogue trilogy, The Lady With No Name takes Part One of his story, from the summer of 1988 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. 320 pages including a map and 17 colour photographs.
Purchase online (from the Book Depository or Amazon)
Borderline Pass - the full trilogy
After The Lady With No Name, Fergus continues his search for adventure. In 1993-4 he rides The Elephant’s Child, a Russian motorcycle with side-car west from Moscow. A year later, he and his new bride take The Cheshire Cat, a condemned VW Beetle, on their honeymoon. Together, they follow the battle-scarred Dalmatian coast to Albania, a land on the brink of civil war, looking for their Garden of Eden. 696 pages including five maps and six line drawings. Purchase online (from the Book Depository or Amazon)
Twenty-four bonus photos, beyond the seventeen in the book
Caption indicates relevant page in The Lady With No Name.
Page numbering in Borderline Pass may differ slightly.

Photo: The author in Izmir on Christmas Day 1988
Fergus Dunlop as a writer
Fergus was born in London in 1958, so is now in his mid-sixties.
His passion for writing began in early boyhood. As a teenager, he edited his school’s fortnightly magazine, and in his final summer turned poacher by launching a competitor. That venture made a profit, and even broke the mould, but at the price of a lifelong caffeine intolerance.
Fergus’ undergraduate and postgraduate research (see below) again explored new ground, but neither of these projects resolved the question of what to do for a job.
By the age of 29, Fergus had hopped from engineering to publishing to retailing. His roles had included production, sales and general management. The one constant was his writing – speeches for members of the British parliament, papers for political campaigns, and an award-winning FTSE 100 annual report.
Eventually, he headed to the City of London, because ‘that was where the money was’. A decade passed, pitching to clients, planning expansions, designing sales databases and crunching asset risk models. Some of his best-sellers were multi-chapter, single-copy investment proposals. Outside of work, the writing continued – his travel journals date from this period: The Lady With No Name, about a circumnavigation of the Mediterranean Sea in his company car; and the trilogy from which it is drawn, Borderline Pass. These books provide a street-level view of European and Middle Eastern life in flux, at the end of the Cold War.
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The next decade passed in Germany, growing the businesses that had resulted from his spreadsheets. But he was still putting pen to paper, on the side, for example with a proposal in German for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s office, and the Finance Ministry, on pension reform.
Early in the new millennium, in parallel with his fund work, he launched an annual tome, German Institutional Investor Positioning. This was an in-depth asset allocation forecast for the year ahead, with English and German language editions, and won a following among pension funds, asset managers, stockbrokers and banks.
In 2006, Fergus took early retirement and his family moved to Guernsey. However, the break from writiing did not last long. He has since helped manage several stock exchange-listed and privately held investment companies. With weighty prospectuses, take-over documents, annual reports and internal policies, striking the right note remains important.
In Guernsey, Fergus became more active in the community. He served as Constable of his parish; chaired a campaign group in the referendum on electoral reform; and stood for the States of Deliberation, the bailiwick’s parliament. He founded a consumer group, Bus Users Guernsey (BUG), and helps lead a church Sunday Club. The writing never stopped – he has circulated pamphlets and research on Guernsey topics (see below), scripted and produced nativity plays and penned dozens of parish magazine articles.
So, with the publication of Borderline Pass (2020) and The Lady With No Name (2021), Fergus stays true to his longest-standing love, arranging a story on the page.

To Infinity & Beyond: a critique of P&R’s vision for post-lockdown
Sent to the Deputies on in June 2020. It notes that two-thirds of our economy can work easily from home; and the Staycation £ is worth three times the spending of visitors

Saying No to the £500m 40-year Bond
Sent to the Deputies in April 2020. P&R’s idea to borrow £500m assumed a dole queue of 10% by Christmas. In the event, it was 1.68%. Even in July 2020, when joblessness was down to 3%, this scare was repeated.

The Risks of States Borrowing
A pamphlet written for Deputies in June 2009, in response to a proposal from Treasury & Resources to borrow £175m at the ‘unrepeatable’bargain rate of 5.7% fixed for 20 years. Happily, Deputies saw the light.

Undergraduate Research
The Council of Peers at Guildhall and Whitehall, December 1688 (Bristol, 1980). This B.A. history dissertation looked back at a moment, still lost to England’s national memory, when London escaped by the slimmest of margins a Bastille Day of its own, a century before the celebrated tipping-point in Paris.

Postgraduate Research
The Management of Assembly Robot Flexibility (Oxford, 1982). This M.Phil. thesis peered into the future of manufacturing, foreseeing as many challenges for managers as for workforces. The conclusion was that robots would not take over assembly lines any time soon.