The Longest Winter Meredith Hooper (John Murray, £20) While Scott was engaged in his fateful race to the South Pole, another group of six men, known as the “eastern party”, were struggling to survive in a man-made ice cave after they rescue ship, the Terra Nova, was forced to abandon them as the sea froze early. Hooper’s book is a study of the six men, isolated in an unbearable winter.

Their stoic response was a tribute both to their training and to the British penchant for seeing things through at all costs.

Originally stranded on the Antarctic coast, theirs was a scientific expedition to survey unmapped territory in support of the main thrust by Scott and his fellow-explorers to the South Pole. The eastern party might have shared the same blizzard-caged fate but for their ingenuity in carvng out a 12ft by 9ft chamber in a deep snowdrift, celebrating special anniversaries with a diet of fried seal brain and suffering frostbite even in their genitals. When they emerged from their six-month ordeal they were half-blind and emaciated, yet still had to march for five weeks to reach their expedition headquarters.

Hooper burrows deeply into the courageous psyche of these enduring heroes, critically resurrecting their role in Polar history that otherwise might have been forgotten. A book that adds much value to the literature of Antarctic exploration.