Joanna Kavenna

We live in a world in which nuance is trampled on and cannot survive. Is that true? I don’t know. But the further point is, must authors now preface their novels with introductory letters, in which they carefully explain the central themes of their work? Epistolary prefaces in general are not remotely new: you often

Polar explorers are often cast as mavericks, and this is hardly surprising. The profession requires a disdain for pseudo-orthodoxies and, besides, the urge to dwell on a frozen ocean or forbidding glacier is maverick in itself. In the so-called Heroic Age (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) both Poles remained ‘unconquered’ and the margin

I suspect travel writing was once a fairly simple business: the author travelled somewhere, the reader did not; the author explained what the place was like and the reader was duly informed and even entertained. Dr Uno von Troil, for example, went to Iceland in 1772 and served up lurid descriptions of the devil holes

On 12 April 1945 the Berlin Philharmonic gave its last performance. The atmosphere in Germany was apocalyptic, the Allied invasion was expected at any moment. The concert playlist had been devised by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, and included Brünnhilde’s last aria and the finale from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the ‘twilight of the gods’. There were reports

One more anniversary, one more cache of commemorative books. This time we are celebrating the half-millennium since Niccolò Machiavelli produced his notorious work, The Prince. He wrote it after a significant career blip in 1512, when the Florentine Republic fell and the Medici regained power. Machiavelli was not merely sacked from his job — secretary

Within a few years, and in four books — The Emigrants (1996), The Rings of Saturn (1998), Vertigo (1999) and Austerlitz (2001) — W. G. Sebald achieved a reputation as a major international author. He was tipped for the Nobel, seen to supply heartening proof that ‘greatness in literature is still possible’ (John Banville) and

This book, as the subtitle explains, makes a bold claim: Griffith Pugh was the ‘unsung hero’ of the 1953 ascent of Everest, his achievements neglected and nearly lost to posterity. Harriet Tuckey is Pugh’s daughter, so this assertion might be little more than a kindly attempt to revive her father’s flagging reputation. Yet, Pugh was

When almost every tale about the Arctic has been told, when the major explorers have been assessed and re-assessed, when even the most obscure bit-players have been drawn into the light, what is a polar-minded author to do? Publishers can be such tiresome sticklers for novelty, always hankering after books to fire off into some

For centuries, the history of the far North was a tapestry of controversies and mis- understandings, misspellings, dubious arrivals and equally dubious departures. Pytheas the Greek sailed north from Britain in the 4th century BC, found a place where the sea, land and sky seemed to merge, and was trounced by later scholars as a

Atlantic by Simon Winchester and The Wave by Susan Casey are, at first glance, very different works. Atlantic is a historical-philosophical-fantastical meditation on the Atlantic ocean, from the ‘post-molten Hadean’ through the ‘cool meadows of today’s Holocene’, to the conjectured end-days of the ocean ‘about 170 million years’ from now. The Wave is a pithy

In 1931, a 23-year-old Englishman called Henry ‘Gino’ Watkins returned from an expedition to the white depths of the Greenlandic ice cap. In 1931, a 23-year-old Englishman called Henry ‘Gino’ Watkins returned from an expedition to the white depths of the Greenlandic ice cap. He was hailed as a precocious talent, even as a worthy

For thousands of years, no one knew what lay in the ice around the North Pole. The blanks on the maps fuelled the imaginations of classical writers, who crafted stories of Hyperboreans living in a gaudy paradise, dancing with Apollo and generally misbehaving. As explorers from southern Europe travelled further north — revealing intransigent and