Every outsider who takes Buddhism seriously enough to become a monk must have an interesting story. I once spent a night in a Buddhist monastery that had been established in a jumble of very old farm buildings in the north of England, and the personalities of the shorn-headed novitiates there suggested a variety of difficult paths and tangled backgrounds (the abbot was an American who’d gotten fascinated with spirituality after his Vietnam war service). Monk With a Camera takes an alluring shortcut to telling one of those stories; instead of focusing on a random Westerner who falls into the saffron robes of the East, it profiles a socialite and onetime jet-setter whose family name conjures the high glamour of a bygone era.