Ever since Captain Cook sailed into the Great Southern Ocean in 1773, mankind has sought to push back the boundaries of Antarctic exploration. The first expeditions tried simply to chart Antarctica's coastline, but then the Sixth International Geographical Congress of 1895 posed a greater challenge: the conquest of the continent itself. Many would die in the attempt. Icy Graves uses the tragic tales not only of famous explorers like Robert Falcon Scott and Aeneas Mackintosh, but also of many lesser-known figures, both British and international, to plot the forward progress of Antarctic exploration. It tells, often in their own words, the compelling stories of the brave men and women who have fallen in what Sir Ernest Shackleton called the 'White Warfare of the South'.

Born Adventurer tells the story of Frank Bickerton (1889-1954), the British engineer on Sir Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14. The expedition gave birth to what Sir Ranulph Fiennes has called 'one of the greatest accounts of polar survival in history' and surveyed for the first time the 2,000-mile stretch of coast around Cape Denison, which later became Adelie Land. The MBE was, however, only one episode in a rich and colourful career. Bickerton accompanied the ill-fated Aeneas Mackintosh on a treasure island hunt to R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, was involved with the early stages of Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and tested 'wingless aeroplanes' in Norway. Born Adventurer follows him through his many experiences, from his flying career in the First World War to his time in California, mixing with the aristocracy of the Hollywood and sporting worlds, and from his safaris in Africa to his distinguished career as an editor and screenplay writer at Shepperton Studios. Stephen Haddelsey draws on unique access to family papers and Bickerton's journals and letters to give us a rich and full account of this incredible adventurer and colourful man.

As Shackleton watched his ship Endurance become trapped in the ice floes of the Weddell Sea, on the other side of Antarctica the expedition's second ship, Aurora, suffered an equally terrifying fate. Under the command of J.R. Stenhouse, the Aurora was torn from her moorings and driven out to sea, becoming trapped in pack ice. For ten months the ice sawed at her hull, until, with her rudder smashed and water cascading from her seams, she broke free and embarked upon her own extraordinary voyage to safe harbour. In Ice Captain Stephen Haddelsey reveals both the story of Stenhouse's achievements aboard the Aurora, but also his many adventures in later life, from serving as a U-boat hunter in WWI, to digging for pirate gold and commanding Scott's Discovery. A captivating book about a fascinating man.

In November 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton watched horrified as the grinding ice floes of the Weddell Sea squeezed the life from his ship, Endurance. Caught in the chaos of splintered wood, buckled metalwork and tangled rigging lay Shackleton's dream of being the first man to complete the crossing of Antarctica. Shackleton would not live to make a second attempt - but his dream endured. Shackleton's Dream tells for the first time the story of the British Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary. Forty years after the loss of Endurance, they set out to succeed where Shackleton had so heroically failed. Using tracked vehicles and converted farm tractors in place of Shackleton's man-hauled sledges, they faced a colossal challenge: a perilous 2,000-mile journey across the most demanding landscape on the planet. This epic adventure saw two giants of twentieth-century exploration pitted not only against Nature at her most hostile, but also against each other. Planned as a historic (and scientific) continental crossing, the expedition would eventually develop into a dramatic 'Race to the South Pole' - a contest as controversial as that of Scott and Amundsen more than four decades earlier.

Seventy years after the end of World War II, the full story of Britain's secret Antarctic expedition has still never been told. Launched in 1943, Operation Tabarin was an expedition to secretly establish bases, keep a watchful eye on German and Japanese activities, and curb opportunistic Argentinian incursions. Ivan Mackenzie Lamb was the expedition's botanist but, until now, his narrative has never been published. His account provides a fascinating insight into this top secret military operation. He was a member of the naval party that established three manned bases, he remained in the field throughout the operation's two-year duration and took part in all three major sledging expeditions. After the war, he used his diary to complete a vivid story of his time in Antarctica. It is a key eyewitness account and has been illustrated with contemporary photos and expedition maps. Operation Tabarin is without doubt one of the most significant expeditions of what might be described as the 'post-Heroic' phase of Antarctic exploration; ultimately it would develop into the British Antarctic Survey, arguably the most important and enduring of all government-sponsored programmes of research in the Antarctic. Operation Tabarin also set in train a series of events that would lead, ultimately, to the Falklands War of 1982.

In 1943, with the German Sixth Army annihilated at Stalingrad and Rommel's Afrika Korps in full retreat after defeat at El Alamein, Winston Churchill's War Cabinet met to discuss the opening of a new front. Its battles would be fought not on the beaches of Normandy or in the jungles of Burma but amid the blizzards and glaciers of the Antarctic. Originally conceived as a means by which to safeguard the Falkland Islands from Japanese invasion and to deny harbours in the sub-Antarctic territories to German surface raiders and U-boats, the expedition also sought to re-assert British sovereignty in the face of incursions by neutral Argentina. As well as setting in train a sequence of events that would eventually culminate in the Falklands War, the British bases secretly established in 1944 would go on to play a vital part in the Cold War and lay the foundations for one of the most important and enduring government-sponsored programmes of scientific research in the polar regions: the British Antarctic Survey. Based upon contemporary sources, including official reports and the diaries and letters of the participants, Operation Tabarin tells for the first time the story of this, the only Antarctic expedition to be launched by any of the combatant nations during the Second World War and one of the most curious episodes in what Ernest Shackleton called 'the white warfare of the south'.