Roland Huntford is the world's foremost authority on the polar expeditions and their protagonists. He is the author of the award-winning Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing, Scott and Amundsen: Last Place on Earth and biographies of Shackleton and Nansen. He was the Scandinavian correspondent on the Observer for many years. He is a Senior Member of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and a former Alistair Horne Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

'Crucially, [Huntford] reads Norwegian, and the translations are his own. Decades of experience allow him to dilate on the idiosyncrasies of fur in the polar environment; on the workings of the anemometers and on the 'meridian sight method of finding latitude' ... This work is brilliant, and well executed.'

• Figures \ Acknowledgements \ Note on the Text \ Dramatis Personae \ Abbreviations \ Introduction \ The Race for the South Pole \ Epilogue \ Glossary \ Notes \ Bibliography \ Index