A biography of Ernest Shackleton, the quintessential Edwardian hero. A contemporary of Scott, he sailed on the Discovery expedition of 1900, and mounted three expeditions of his own. A social adventurer, it was the pursuit of wealth, fame and power that attracted him more than snow and ice. Shacketon an Anglo-Irishman who letf school at 16, he needed status to raise money for his own expeditions. A frustrated poet, he was never successful with money, but did succeed in marrying it. At his height he was feted as an national hero, knighted by Edward VII, and granted u20,000 by the government...

Behind the great polar explorers of the early twentieth century - Amundsen, Shackleton, Scott in the South and Peary in the North - looms the spirit of Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930), the mentor of them all. He was the father of modern polar exploration, the last act of territorial discovery before the leap into space began.
Nansen was a prime illustration of Carlyle's dictum that 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men'. He was not merely a pioneer in the wildly diverse fields of oceanography and skiing, but one of the founders of neurology. A restless, unquiet Faustian...

In 1910 Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen set sail for Antarctica, each from his own starting point, and the epic race for the South Pole was on.

For the first time Scott's unedited diaries run alongside those of both Amundsen and Olav Bjaaland, never before translated into English. Cutting through the welter of controversy to the events at the heart of the story, Huntford weaves the narrative from the protagonists' accounts of their own fate. What emerges is a whole new understanding of what really happened on the ice and the definitive account of the Race for the South Pole.

Roland Huntford's brilliant history begins 20,000 years ago in the last ice age on the icy tundra of an unformed earth. Man is a travelling animal, and on these icy slopes skiing began as a means of survival.
That it has developed into the leisure and sporting pursuit of choice by so much of the globe bears testament to its elemental appeal. In polar exploration, it has changed the course of history. Elsewhere, in war and peace, it has done so too. The origins of skiing are bound up in with the emergence of modern man and the world we live in today.