Where are the snows of yesteryear?

I like a book where you don’t think you’re going to be interested in the subject, but then find it’s so vigorously and engagingly written that you’re enchanted. This is one of those. I’m not a skier —I’m quickly bored when coffee-drinking mothers start recounting their children’s latest achievements on the piste — so I expected to have had enough by page five, as I set off across the blinding whiteness of this ‘biography’ of snow, written by a man who’s wearing ski-goggles in the jacket photo.

But in Giles Whittell’s genial company, reading it was a great pleasure. An eloquent, witty writer, he bombards us with myth-busting facts, startling statistics and pleasingly incomprehensible geographical vocabulary, so it’s like enjoying a mélange of top daytime Radio 4 programmes: More or Less, Crossing Continents, Costing the Earth, Word of Mouth and Ramblings.

A true, deep enthusiast for snow, having fallen in love with the stuff as a boy reading Laura Ingalls Wilder describing pouring streams of molasses into it to make candy, Whittell is determined to convert us to his enthusiasm.