Sara Wheeler 
A paralysed landscape
‘Very, very, very sexy’, a field-researcher scratches in his Antarctic notebook. He is describing a meteorite the size of a £1 coin that he has just picked up off the… Read more
A new world in the making
Alexis de Tocqueville is a prophet for all seasons, continually reinterpreted as the zeitgeist shifts. He sailed to Jacksonian America to compile a report on the prison system, and ended… Read more
Way out west
This year America celebrates the cent-enary of Mark Twain’s death. This year America celebrates the cent-enary of Mark Twain’s death. He is the nearest that country gets to a national… Read more
The iceman cometh
True North: Travels in Arctic Europe, by Gavin Francis This is an old-fashioned travel book of the linear variety. Roaming the northern fringes of Europe with a tent and a… Read more
Lust in a hot climate
This sprightly book recounts the life of Idina Sackville, the author’s great-grandmother. A glamorous aristocrat with a penchant for scandal, she married and divorced five times and was a protagonist… Read more
The year of the rat
‘Ah,’ Robert Sullivan exclaims in this artful book, ‘the excitement, the nail-biting and palpably semi-wild thrill of ratting in the city!’ An otherwise apparently sane American writer and journalist, Sullivan… Read more
Serving Christ and colonialism
Fergus Fleming is the author of three volumes of narrative history, the best of which, Barrow’s Boys, gives a rollicking account of 19th-century Arctic exploration. Now he has lighted on… Read more
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