It says something for the writer's ability that the description of a more than three-month long unassisted trek pulling 500lb sledges across various sorts of ice and snow kept me reading. After all, nothing ever happened. They just went forward and nearly fell into this crevasse, actually fell into that one, climbed this ice feature, but went round that one and through it all were hungry, cold and had bad feet and fingers and when they weren't being friends, then they were out of sorts with each other. It helped that the accompanying photographs show a quite spectacular landscape where light is all. However, I now feel that since I've 'literally' been to the South Pole once, I need never ever do it again.

I worked briefly for the author's co-adventurer, Sir Ranulph Fiennes who was quite unbelievably charming and almost as handsome (I'm surprised the ice didn't melt before his feet, so hot was he). I might have stayed in that job if he'd been there more often but he was away, arranging another trek most of the time. Baronets and world-famous explorers don't have the same work structures as the rest of us!

The author, especially at the end, has a very ambivalent attitude towards Ran's public retelling of their assault on the South Pole, and it seemed almost as if he wrote the book to justify his own, joint part in it, and for that pettiness which made me think of girls-in-the-toilet bitching about their friends on the dance floor, the book gets three rather than four stars.

PS They made it up and are best of friends again and even did seven marathons in seven countries on seven consecutive days together. Explorers and adventurers are just different from the rest of us. ( )

read Ranulph's version too. Good to get accounts from both parties. Quite bitchy in places, which makes a change from the Heroic Age when anything for public consumption was rosy. ( )