The Antarctic: An Anthology, Ed. Francis Spufford

How strange that the explorer Roald Amundsen could barely convey his victory ("I cannot say... that the object of my life was attained," he wrote after reaching the South Pole),

while Cherry-Garrard, recalling "The Worst Journey in the World", wrote about it with such singular descriptive brilliance: "a spell of cold immensity, vague, ponderous, a breeding place of wind and drift and darkness". An icy blast howls from these pages. It is impossible to turn them for long without having to reach for a sweater – but there is only one of Francis Spufford's selections that you wouldn't wish to be any longer. HP Lovecraft's turgid witterings about "the primal entities which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed place" is a literary slog.