Having also been arrested at least 60 times across the world, last Saturday the 42-year-old hauled himself back into the local media spotlight by scaling Hong Kong's 62-storey Cheung Kong Center.

Although Two IFC is taller, Robert claims it's easier to get stopped there, and so chose the smaller building next to the Bank of China, nine years after his ascent up the Far East Financial Centre. Before getting arrested again, of course. 'I like the thrill of it,' he says, reclining in his Wan Chai hotel room a few days after his latest climb. This interview could easily have taken place in a prison cell: detained immediately after his stunt, Robert was fortunate to have previously secured the services of a local lawyer with which to bat away objections from security staff, the police, or of the twitchy American Consulate nearby.

'First thing I said to the cops who met me at the top was that I didn't commit any offence,' he says. 'I knew they couldn't charge me for endangering other people because I climbed the side of the building that looks out onto the park. It's no big deal if I die, but if anyone else gets injured then that's different. Thankfully the police are very cool here, and let me off. Not like in Tokyo where one cop punched me in the face when I got to the top of a building.'

As if risking life and limb wasn't enough, the prospect of getting arrested or beaten up - or both - when you get to the top, begs the obvious question. 'I guess I do this because it gives me perspective,' says Robert. 'Before the ascent I feel so alive, just in the knowledge that in the next few hours I could be dead. It makes you realise how your life is precious, how the little things like money, are really all just bulls***.'

Although without money, of course, he'd still be climbing cliffs in his home town of Valence in the South of France and working in a sports shop to fund his dreams. This latest trip was partly sponsored by a Macau casino, and he regularly adorns logos of sponsors or good causes when he climbs. Just don't ask him if money is his motive.

'Journalists around the world say this about my climbs. Even after the climb on Saturday, some were saying that I was climbing for money, and that really p***es me off. It's stupid. I've fallen six times; I get a 66 per cent disability allowance in France. Each time I'm lying in hospital I'm thinking about climbing again. This is my life; I'm not doing it for the money.'

Exotic travel expenses and frequent bail postings aside, there's no questioning his true passion. This is the man who met his wife with both arms in plaster after a climbing accident, and who ended up in a five-day coma eight months later after a 15-metre headfirst fall, which broke his skull and crushed his left wrist.

Today, that wrist is completely inflexible, but doesn't stop him from making his daring ascents.

Nor do his roles as a husband and father: his wife and two children remain in France, enduring his repeated quests across the globe. 'It's my life, you know. When I first met my wife I'd already been climbing for a long time. If one day she turned around and asked me not to climb, I would quit my wife, not climbing.'

He is nevertheless aware of the stress his occupation causes. 'When I was 10 metres from the top of Cheung Kong, I called her to say that everything was fine. I'm not so selfish you know. I called her before I began to climb also. She can feel that I'm under pressure - she never shows me that she is anxious, but I can feel when she is relieved.'

You could say that Robert is, in many ways, a psychoanalyst's dream. With his long golden mane, tight leather trousers and cowboy boots, the flamboyant king of the urban jungle is also surprisingly diminutive in the flesh, despite striding the world's tallest buildings like a colossus. For one who has scaled so many storeys without gloves, his hands are also surprisingly smooth and petite. Psychiatrists might regard his skyscraper antics, therefore, as a turbo-charged example of 'small man syndrome'.

'I had a real lack of confidence when I was younger. The day I was presented with my first climbing challenge was a definite turning point.' Forgetting the keys to his family apartment in Valence, a 12-year-old Robert climbed seven storeys to clamber in through a window.

'In a funny way, I had the spirit of wanting to be brave and courageous but I just couldn't do it. Climbing gave me confidence. When I was young I had a phobia for heights, but I learned how to deal with my fear and I'm now addicted to it. It's a buzz.'

Among his achievements are successful, rope-free climbs of New York's Empire State Building, the Montparnasse and Eiffel towers in Paris, Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the 54-storey Shinjuku Tower in Tokyo, Chicago's Sears Tower, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge (after which he was arrested and detained for five days), and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which he climbed on the eve of the 2003 Rugby World Cup final, causing a security uproar.

Although he won't be drawn into the less successful climbs 'there's no worst climb: as long as you don't fall, you will live,' his attention-seeking antics haven't always gone according to plan. His rescue by firemen on Paris' 110-metre Grande Arche de la Defense, when overcome by the heat reflected from the building's white slabs, drew criticism that he was draining the already stretched resources of the emergency services.

He was also thwarted on the mainland in 2001, where a decidedly less tolerant legal system led Robert to seek authorisation before climbing. Unable to get approval to scale Shanghai's 88-storey Jinmai Tower, he was later upstaged by Han Qizhi, a shoe salesman from Anhui province, who was 'struck by a rash impulse' and began to scale the building bare handed days after Robert's story appeared in the press, only to be arrested and carted off by the authorities early into his impromptu ascent.

Despite the obvious self promotion, Robert has used his climbs to offer his thoughts on everything from the Iraq invasion to racism and Aids, as well as raising money for charity (one climb in Borneo fetched US$150,000). In the United Arab Emirates he has been embraced, with authorities giving him the novelty of pre-approved climbs up buildings and financial support in return for his support of education foundations there.

He even admits to the odd night climb when nobody's looking, 'although things like that usually happen when I'm drunk. There are plenty of ways to die, and if I had the choice I'd rather die in action.

'I have another five years of climbing left in me. But I've been saying that for 10 years already.'

'If one day [MY wife] turned around and asked me not to climb, I would quit my wife, not climbing'