Andy Pollitt is as close to a Hollywood A-lister as the climbing world will ever get. He had the looks, and he starred in all the big roles in the 1980s and 1990s - Tremadog, Pen Trwyn, the big Gogarth climbs, Raven Tor and the cult Australian adventures. Alongside co-stars like Jerry Moffatt, John Redhead and Malcolm 'HB' Matheson, he brought us sexy climbing - gone were the beards, the woolly socks and the fibre pile. Andy was all skin-tight pink Lycra, vests and brooding looks. For thos...

On 14 June 1990, at Raven Tor in the Derbyshire Peak District, twenty-four-year-old Ben Moon squeezed his feet into a pair of rock shoes, tied in to his rope, chalked his fingers and pulled on to the wickedly overhanging, zebra-striped wall of limestone. Two minutes later he had made rock-climbing history with the first ascent of Hubble, now widely recognised as the world's first F9a. Born in the suburbs of London in 1966, Moon started rock climbing on the sandstone outcrops of Kent and Su...

The Next Horizon, the second volume in Chris Bonington's autobiography after I Chose to Climb, picks up his story from 1962 and relates his subsequent adventures as a mountaineer, photographer, journalist and expedition leader alongside eminent climbers including Doug Scott and Don Whillans, throughout an extraordinary decade of adversity, thrill and discovery.The book opens with ...

Bob Shepton is an ordained minister in the Church of England in his 70s, but spends most of his time sailing into the Arctic and making first ascents of inaccessible mountains. No tea parties for this vicar.Opening with the disastrous fire that destroyed his yacht whilst he was ice-bound in Greenland, the book travels back to his childhood growing up on his family's rubber plantation in Malaysia, moving back to England after his father was shot by the Japanese during the war, board...

Some mountains are high; some mountains are hard. Few are both.On the afternoon of 13 July 1977, having become the first climbers to reach the summit of the Ogre, Doug Scott and Chris Bonington began their long descent. In the minutes that followed, any feeling of success from their achievement would be overwhelmed by the start of a desperate fight for survival. And things would only get worse.Rising to over 7,000 metres in...

Understanding the motivations behind those who partake in extreme sports can be difficult for some. If the popular conception holds that the incentive behind extreme sports participation is entirely to do with risking one’s life, then this confusion will continue to exist. However, an in-depth examination of the phenomenology of the extreme sport experience yields a much more complex picture.This book revisits the definition of extreme sports as those activities where a mismanaged ...