Geography

’Tis the season of complacency, when we sit in warmth and shiver vicariously with Mary and Joseph out in the snowy wastes, A Christmas Carol or The Snowman. A handsome exploration of Antarctica seems equally appropriate festive fare. Peter Fretwell brings us chillingly close to a continent that has always inspired awe, evidenced by christenings such as Mount Erebus and Fenriskjeften — the Wolf’s Jaw mountains, named after Fenris, the Norse equivalent of the Beast, which will arise at the end of time to eat the world. The coldest, driest, remotest and windiest place on the planet, surrounded by the roughest ocean, has always seemed like somewhere primordial deities might

Holiday islands, desert islands, love islands, islands of eternal youth, siren islands, islands filled with screaming demons. Of all the earth’s topographic features, islands are the most elastic, the most adept at accommodating the wilder projections of our imagination. Why it should be so is a question that has exercised writers from D.H. Lawrence to Oscar Wilde, Annie Dillard to Adam Nicolson. The cultural geographer John Gillis identifies it as a curiously western trait, an extension of the metaphysical thirst for definition, the need to cut everything up into discrete entities in order to understand it. Island Dreams is Gavin Francis’s own contribution to the debate, based on his decades-long

Geography can be history and history geography — and sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked. Laurence C. Smith’s Rivers of Power endeavours to make us see beneath the surfaces of arterial waters and consider them as carriers of civilisation and arbiters of destinies. Rivers are elemental and ambivalent. They are frontiers and highways, destroyers and fertilisers, fishing grounds and spiritual metaphors, power-givers and flushers of poisons. They are the veins of terrains, which like our own veins carry oxygen or pathogens, and extinction when they fail. They inspired Babylonian and Roman legal codes, outlining ideas about access, drainage, fishing, irrigation, maintenance, navigation, pollution and sharing that still course through

We ought to cherish the haunted landscape of the Thames Estuary while we can. The grey hulks of old power stations, the white domes of oil refineries, the sternly rectilinear factories, all of which once seemed oppressive, are now instead poetic because of their near extinction. Caroline Crampton’s atmospheric and movingly written exploration of the Thames, and that once-industrial estuary, is especially illuminating on the soul of the river; and she investigates satisfyingly what it is in these silent marshes and concrete embanked paths that still generates such an odd sense of unease. Her relation to the river and the sea beyond is especially strong: her parents built their own

Later this month, a boat builder from Lake Titicaca in Bolivia will fly to the Russian city of Sochi to begin work on a 40-foot craft made from papyrus reeds. A German-led expedition hopes Fermín Limachi’s construction skills will see them safely across the Black Sea and eventually on to Athens. It is a mad idea, but not an entirely novel one. Nearly 50 years ago, Limachi’s father was persuaded by the Norwegian explorer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl to embark on something very similar. But the route back then was from Morocco to South America, a journey of some 6,100km. Heyerdahl is one of the dozens of fascinating — and

Having spent too much of my life at both poles (writing, not sledge-pulling), I know the spells those places cast. Michael Bravo promises to reveal something of that enigma, claiming at the outset of his book: ‘I will treat the mysterious power and allure of the North Pole in a way you will not have seen before.’ The volume is one of an interesting series on the cultural history of natural phenomena, that includes a title on Fire, and another on Swamp. Bravo structures his book around the struggle of navigators and philosophers to make sense of the strange powers of the North Pole, beginning with the ancients of Greece,

Given that he wrote and published some of the most stunningly handsome books of the 17th century, John Ogilby has not been served well by literary history. The Fables of Aesop (1651), the first complete English translation of Virgil (1654), a two-volume edition of the Authorised Version of the Bible (1660) plus vernacular versions of the Iliad (1660) and Odyssey (1665) were all magisterial folios, produced with the clearest of type, the widest of margins and on the heaviest of paper. Ogilby wrote specifically for those with deep pockets and fine libraries, an elite book-buying public who could afford translations illustrated with copious and expensive engravings. He would have been

In his Forward Prize-winning collection of 2014, A Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, Kei Miller’s hero describes his craft thus: ‘My job is to imagine the widening/ of the unfamiliar and also/ the widening ache of it;/ to anticipate the ironic/ question: how did we find/ ourselves here.’ This bringing of the unfamiliar into scope looms large in three new collections of cartographic curiosities which tell us about places that never were, places we’ve never been and places we will never go to. Edward Brooke-Hitching’s beautifully illustrated The Phantom Atlas presents the stories of over 50 locations that unwarrantedly found their way on to maps. In many

Some years ago, when I stepped from an unstable boat onto Juan Fernández island, a friendly man took my bag and introduced himself as Robinson. Ten minutes later, I found a room to rent. The homeowner’s first name was Crusoe. Get the idea? Although Defoe set his story hundreds of miles away, near the mouth of the Orinoco, Juan Fernández was where the real Crusoe, the Scottish sailing master Alexander Selkirk, spent four years and four months in the company only of goats. Andrew Lambert has had the very good idea of writing a kind of historical biography of the 15×5-mile lump of volcanic rock 415 miles off the coast

The Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt was once the most famous man in Europe bar Napoleon. And if you judge a man by his friends (as you should), how about Goethe, Schiller, Simon Bolivar, Cuvier, Lamarck, Laplace, Guy-Lussac and Jefferson? And that is only the start of the supper list. So what happened? Why is he forgotten? For the best of reasons: because he contributed so much to so many fields of intellectual interest that are now separate scientific disciplines. And also because most of his ideas that were once startlingly original are now commonplace. We take it for granted that there are vast rivers running through the seas (but

Suddenly, the Maldivians are in the news. Earlier this year, they locked up their first democratically elected president, and just recently they declared a state of emergency. It never used to be like this. The Maldives was just a place you saw in brochures, looking expensively turquoise. It has a population no bigger than Barnet (350,000), and 99 per cent of the country is covered in water. Until recently, even its neighbour, Sri Lanka, hardly seemed to notice it. During my time in Colombo, visiting Maldivians were merely a source of idle curiosity. They flew into town either to pick up a secular education or to get roaring drunk. It

In a grand history of the British empire — because that is what this book really is —  you might expect more hand-wringing from a historian and Labour MP who has previously written a life of Engels. But despite quoting Marx half a dozen times (and Lenin, twice!) there is something about the idea of empire that excites Tristram Hunt. And this is a book about ideas, for all that it is rich in architectural description, economic fact and colourful anecdote. It describes how — and indeed when and where — the imperial ideology shaped and reshaped itself. As such, it is a nuanced riposte to those historians of empire,

When it comes to choosing good books to read on holiday, I am a great believer in selecting reading matter to match the destination. What better to read in Sicily than Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s The Leopard, for instance? And how wonderful to read Laurie Lee’s beautiful As I Walked Out one Midsummer Morning while in Spain. This school of thought can be taken to extremes — I even have a friend who chooses her holidays based entirely on what she wants to read. The only downside to this approach is that when summer stretches ahead of you with no sunny holiday on the horizon, then you feel not only