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Ever since Captain Cook first sailed into the Great Southern Ocean in 1773, mankind has sought to push back the boundaries of Antarctic exploration. The first expeditions tried simply to chart Antarctica's coastline, but then the Sixth International Geographical Congress of 1895 posed a greater challenge: the conquest of the continent itself. Though the loss of Captain Scott's Polar Party remains the most famous, many of the resulting expeditions suffered fatalities. Some men drowned; others fell into bottomless crevasses; many died in catastrophic fires; a few went mad; and yet more froze to death. Modern technology increased the pace of exploration, but aircraft and motor vehicles introduced entirely new dangers. For the first time, Icy Graves uses the tragic tales not only of famous explorers like Robert Falcon Scott and Aeneas Mackintosh but also of many lesser-known figures, both British and international, to plot the forward progress of Antarctic exploration. It tells, often in their own words, the compelling stories of the brave men and women who have fallen in what Sir Ernest Shackleton called the 'White Warfare of the South'.
In 1943, with the German Sixth Army annihilated at Stalingrad and Rommel's Afrika Korps in full retreat after defeat at El Alamein, Winston Churchill's War Cabinet met to discuss the opening of a new front. Its battles would be fought not on the beaches of Normandy or in the jungles of Burma but amid the blizzards and glaciers of the Antarctic. Originally conceived as a means by which to safeguard the Falkland Islands from Japanese invasion and to deny harbours in the sub-Antarctic territories to German surface raiders and U-boats, the expedition also sought to re-assert British sovereignty in the face of incursions by neutral Argentina. As well as setting in train a sequence of events that ...
The first full biography of the naval Captain whose seamanship freed Shackleton's ship, Aurora, from the ice, and who rescued the marooned Ross Sea Party.
Born Adventurer tells the story of Frank Bickerton (1889-1954), the British engineer on Sir Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14. The expedition gave birth to what Sir Ranulph Fiennes has called 'one of the greatest accounts of polar survival in history' and surveyed for the first time the 2,000-mile stretch of coast around Cape Denison, which later became Adelie Land. The MBE was, however, only one episode in a rich and colourful career. Bickerton accompanied the ill-fated Aeneas Mackintosh on a treasure island hunt to R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, was involved with the early stages of Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and te...
'An adroit, intelligent and painstaking social history ... Poor Bickerton offers us a luxurious tapestry from which everyone interested in English social history in the late-Georgian period can learn something new and surprising.' – Professor Jerry White, author of London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing On 8 October 1833, Coroner Thomas Higgs opened an inquest into the death of John Bickerton, an elderly eccentric who, despite rumours of his wealth and high connections, had died in abject squalor, 'from the want of the common necessaries of life'. Over the coming hours, Higgs and his jury would unpick the details of Bickerton's strange, sad story: a story that began ...
In November 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton watched horrified as the grinding ice floes of the Weddell Sea squeezed the life from his ship, Endurance . Caught in the chaos of splintered wood, buckled metalwork and tangled rigging lay Shackleton's dream of being the first man to complete the crossing of Antarctica. Shackleton would not live to make a second attempt – but his dream endured. Shackleton's Dream tells for the first time the story of the British Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary. Forty years after the loss of Endurance, they set out to succeed where Shackleton had so heroically failed. Using tracked vehicles and converted farm tracto...
Pink Floyd are one of the most iconic and influential rock bands in the world: their sonic ambition, lyrical dexterity and structural ability are unparalleled in rock music. Since their formation in 1965, they have released 15 studio albums and sold over 250 million records. Their eighth album, Dark Side of the Moon, is one of the highest-selling British albums in the world. Mike Cormack takes a deep dive into the music of Pink Floyd, resulting in the first serious appraisal of the band's immense achievements, whilst also giving an overview of the UK's concurrent social and political history as seen through the prism of the band. In addition to a song-by-song analysis, Mike also shares exclusive band interviews, a full chronology and gig guide, and a full bootleg guide. Everything Under the Sun is the definitive account of the career of rock's most devastatingly emotional and articulate band.
Much has been written on Antarctic explorer, Ernest Shackleton. This is the story of the Endurance expedition's other hero, Joseph Russell Stenhouse (1887-1941) who, as Captain of the SS Aurora, freed the ship from pack ice and rescued the survivors of the Ross Sea shore party, deeds for which he was awarded the Polar Medal and the OBE. He was also recruited for special operations in the Arctic during the First World War, became involved in the Allied intervention in Revolutionary Russia, and was later appointed to command Captain Scott's Discovery. Stenhouse was one of the last men to qualify as a sea captain during the age of sail.
This is the first comprehensive study of the neglected Irish writers of the Victorian age, whose work was highly popular with the British reading audience and therefore disparaged and largely forgotten from the era of W.B. Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, with its culturally nationalist agenda, onwards. It is based on a reading of around 370 novels by 150 authors, including William Carleton, the peasant novelist who wielded much influence, and Charles Lever, whose serious work was destroyed by the slur of 'rollicking', as well as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, George Moore, Emily Lawless, Somerville and Ross, Bram Stoker, and three of the leading authors from the new-woman movement, Sarah Gran...
Featuring some of the oldest recipes for cocktails and cordials ever recorded, this gift book combines cocktail making and historyCombining the fascinating archive of the first Duchess of Northumberland with the expertise of the present Duchess and creator of the famous Poison Garden at Alnwick Castle, Jane, this unique compilation of historical cocktails, cordials, and elixirs has been taken from the vast store of letters and papers in the Alnwick archive. They reveal delicious recipes for cocktails, cordials, and elixirs long forgotten, including Rhubarb Champagne, Alnwick Rum, Hot Gin, and Aphrodisiac Elixir. The collection is brought fully up to date by the present Duchess of Northumberland with the inclusion of her famous Deadly Jane cocktail.