Harry Mount

Beautiful losers

The peculiarly British tendency to glorify disaster certainly doesn’t stem from guilt about the empire, as Stephanie Barczewski insists

issue 20 February 2016

When Henry Worsley died last month attempting the first solo, unaided expedition across the Antarctic, he was 30 miles short of the finish line. He fits right in with a long British tradition of heroic failures: General Gordon killed at Khartoum; the defeat of the British by the Zulus at Isandlwana.

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