Fergus Fleming
Footloose
Racing with Death: Douglas Mawson – Antarctic Explorer
By Beau Riffenburgh
Bloomsbury 320pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
Four giants stalked the Antarctic in the years before the First World War. Of Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott you will know. Of Douglas Mawson you may not. Now, thanks to Beau Riffenburgh’s latest book, you can.
Mawson is probably the least celebrated character from a period that is dubbed the Age of Heroes. He was an Australian geologist, a man of outstanding endurance, a muscular Christian and his country’s first world-class explorer. He accompanied Shackleton on the 1907–9 Nimrod expedition, during which he not only reached the South Magnetic Pole but became the first man to climb Antarctica’s live volcano, Mount Erebus. He stood more than six feet tall in his socks, believed in God and the Empire, and had no doubts about himself whatsoever.
Such was his ability that when Scott planned his trip to the South Pole, one of the people he most wanted on the team was Mawson. He offered him every inducement, including a place on the coveted final stretch to the Pole. Mawson declined. Not for him such glory-seeking antics.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger