A lifetime of listening to - and learning from - horses

He's the man who listens to horses, and he's been doing it for so long he must have heard it all by now. The difficult ones, the frightened ones, the confused ones, the angry ones, the shy ones - Monty Roberts hears them out, helps them out, for once it was they who helped him.

Roberts, a mild-mannered Californian with a slow, careful conversational style, a gentle voice made for bedtime stories, is talking about violence. The topic seems a very long way from where Roberts is now, sitting comfortably on an armchair in Lambourn, beginning to spin a yarn as effortlessly as a white-hatted cowboy might spin rope, but that just illustrates how far he has come. He once had a brutal childhood, a body full of broken bones and a skeleton in the closet; and they do say the best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse.

"I found myself being a flash-violent sort of person," he says, sounding nothing of the sort. "It was the first thing my brain knew. When I was a kid I played [American] football because it gave me a legitimate means to be violent. Horses showed me that violence wasn't the way."