Russian spies and Japanese POWs
By the standards of many MPs, Nick Clegg has led a colourful life...
Ancestors on his father's side include a Russian baroness who spied for the Soviet Union and seduced the author H G Wells.
Meanwhile, his Dutch mother and her parents were interned during the Second World War in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in colonial Java.
As a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, he and a friend were arrested for setting fire to a collection of rare cacti belonging to a professor.
He once acted opposite a teenage Helena Bonham-Carter, pictured, in a university play about Aids.
After studying archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, he briefly became, in his own words, a "ski bum". While recuperating from an accident on the slopes he tried to write a novel, which he later described as "embarrassingly bad".
Clegg and two friends, Louis and Marcel Theroux, went on a road trip through the US, where he frequently practised transcendental meditation to pass the time during the long car journeys.
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Weather for Sheffield
Wednesday 23 May 2012
Today
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Temperature: 13 C to 23 C
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