A team of injured soldiers scaling Everest, including a man from Wiltshire, was stranded at camp as the mountain was battered by high speed winds.

Sailing beyond the Arctic Circle is one of the few fast-growing sectors of the cruise industry. More ships are based at UK ports for the summer than ever, with many venturing to Norway, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and beyond. A voyage to the far north is immensely appealing. In one sense an Arctic adventure is the ultimate day trip, because the summer sun will not fall beneath the horizon all summer. And a thousand miles beyond the tree line, tourists can confront some of the world's rawest edges from the comfort of a cruise-ship cocoon. Mountains that no human has ever climbed soar from the ocean. Thick veins of snow trickle from the peaks and fuel the glaciers that gouge through the rock in geology's perpetual power struggle.

Matt Dickinson, 46

A loss of sea ice could be a cause of the bitter winds that have swept across the UK in the past week, weather experts say

Could the British still summon the stoicism of Captain Scott, asks Harry Mount

From requests for Lego and leg warmers to a popcorn maker and a Puffle, letters to Santa are an art form in themselves. Clare Dwyer Hogg delves into the world of children's wishlists.

It is certainly a house, its wooden frame, painted in soft hues of white and blue, perched prettily in its waterside setting. But I am not convinced, as I open its creaking front door, that it was ever a home – at least, not in the idea of a welcoming shelter from the storm.

Six British adventurers were "on top of the world" yesterday after they became the first team to row to the magnetic North Pole.

A team of British adventurers was poised last night to become the first to row to the 1996 magnetic North Pole.

You don't get to meet people like this very often," said Harry Wales, describing the four disabled Afghanistan veterans whose trek to the North Pole he was briefly going to join. Well, I don't, Harry, I thought... but surely it can't be that much of a rarity for you? It goes with the job really, doesn't it? All those hospital visits and hearts-and-minds tours, all those occasions when a royal handshake is assumed to be a sovereign remedy for the riot-struck and the dispossessed. It's partly what a prince is for these days. The old role, of being inaccessibly distant and more special than anyone around them, lingers on. But to it has been added the new duty of being ostentatiously less special than certain commoners. Prince Harry – regal rugger bugger and honorary squaddie – is actually quite good at this. As he said in Harry's Arctic Heroes: "I like to think I'm just one of the lads, whether I am or not."

One of the books I have read and re-read with unfailing pleasure and interest is Jules Verne's 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'. I can date my first reading precisely, as I still have my copy, given to me by "Mummy and Daddy, Christmas 1948", when I was nine. This edition was published in 1946 in Cleveland, Ohio, and has beautiful illustrations of sea creatures and seascapes, and of the brave adventurers who travel with Captain Nemo in his spacious submarine, the Nautilus. As a child, I liked the pictures of the narwhale and the kelp forest best, but now I also admire the narrator and his manservant Conseil, portrayed in handsome nakedness. Illustrated books were a rarity in that post-war period, and all the more to be cherished.

The retreat of sea ice in the Arctic is not just opening up the fabled North-West Passage to shipping. It has made it possible for explorers to row to the North Pole.

The much-loved Plough is riding high in the heavens.

Prince Harry is starting a trek to the North Pole with a team of soldiers who were wounded in combat.