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 between glory and opprobrium was slender.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £17 Tel: 08430 600033. Joanna Kavenna, is the author of The Ice Museum, an account of her journeys through Norway, Iceland, the Baltic and Greenland.
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