Claudius Claudianus (fl. circa 400 AD) was one of the last major poets of the Roman Empire. Highly regarded by his contemporaries, he is one of the great transmitters of Latin culture to Medieval Europe. The Panegyric on the IVth Consulate of the Emperor Honorius, written for an important state occasion, ranks among his major works. Its core is a detailed discourse on kingship, a subject of paramount interest which the Middle Ages inherited from antiquity; and in its entirety it is an interestingly worked example of formal encomium - the praise of a ruler. William Barr's translation sets out...

Emil Bessels was chief scientist and medical officer on George Francis Hall's ill-fated American North Pole Expedition of 1871-73 on board the ship Polaris. Bessels' book, translated from the German in its entirety for the first time, is one of only two first-hand accounts of the voyage, and it is the only first-hand account of the experiences of the group which stayed with the ship after it ran afoul of arctic ice, leaving some of its crew stranded on an ice floe. Bessels and the others spent a second winter on shore in Northwest Greenland, where the drifting, disabled ship ran aground. Hall...