Here, from the distinguished mountaineer Eric Shipton, is the dramatic story of the Golden Age of Mountaineering. Mountain Conquests brings vividly to life the great climbing successes that were scored first in the Alps and then around the world - from the Matterhorn and Mount Blanc to Mount Everest, Denali, and K2.

'When a man is conscious of the urge to explore, not all the arduous journeyings, the troubles that will beset him and the lack of material gains from his investigations will stop him.' Nanda Devi is one of the most inaccessible mountains in the Himalaya. It is surrounded by a huge ring of peaks, among them some of the highest mountains in the Indian Himalaya. For fifty years the finest mountaineers of the early twentieth century had repeatedly tried and failed to reach the foot of the mou...

In 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest. They climbed from the south, from Nepal, via the Khumbu Glacier - a route first pioneered in 1951 by a reconnaissance expedition led by Eric Shipton. Everest 1951 is the account of this expedition.It was the first to approach the mountain from the south side, it pioneered a route through the Khumbu icefall and ...

In Mountains of Tartary, mountaineering and explorer Eric Shipton describes his climbs and explorations in northern and central Asia, taking the reader places that most would otherwise never go and writing with humour and self-deprecation.During the Second World War, and up until 1951, Shipton worked as consul general in Kunming and Kashgar in China, and as a diplomat in Hungary and Persia. In Mountains of Tartary, he describes hi...

• One of the greatest explorers of the 20th century• Shipton’s Everest explorations set the stage for its conquest by Edmund HillaryEric Shipton was an adventurer when adventure meant traveling to places for which no maps existed, scaling mountains whose heights were uncalculated, and encountering people whom no westerner had ever met. That Untravelled World, originally published in 1969, is his autobiography, written near the end of his career, when the passing of time had ...

The area around the Indian mountain Nanda Devi is wild and isolated. This is a fascinating insight to the men who explored this region long before GPS and satellite photography, the men who climbed mountains with maps and theodolites in hand. Eric Shipton was one of a band of famous climbers and here presented is the lecture he gave on his return. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are ...

'As I studied the maps, one thing about them captured my imagination - Across this blank space was written one challenging word, "Unexplored"' In 1937 two of the twentieth century's greatest explorers set off to explore an unknown area of the Himalaya, the breath-taking Shaksgam mountains. With a team of surveyors and Sherpas, Eric Shipton and H.W. Tilman located and mapped the land around K2, the second-highest mountain in the world. It was their greatest venture, and one that paved the w...

Upon that Mountain is the first autobiography of the mountaineer and explorer Eric Shipton. In it, he describes all his pre-war climbing, including his Everest bids of the 1930s, and his second Karakoram survey in 1939, when he returned to Snow Lake to complete the mapping of the ranges flanking the Hispar and Choktoi glacier systems around the Ogre. Crossing great swathes of the Himalaya, the book, like so many of Shipton's works, is both entertaining and an important addition to the moun...

'It is often from our setbacks, even our weaknesses, that we derive some of our greatest blessings.' That Untravelled World is the autobiography of one of the greatest adventurers of the twentieth century. Eric Shipton was a pioneering explorer, journeying to places that did not feature on maps and to unexplored mountains, such as the High Dauphiné. Shipton describes early childhood days filled with adventures; his first encounter with the high mountains on a visit to the Pyrenees, and the...

Land of Tempest reveals Eric Shipton at his best - writing with enthusiasm and humour about his explorations in Patagonia in the 1950s and 1960s. He is an astute observer of nature and the human spirit, and this account of his travels is infused with with his own zest for discovery and the joy of camaraderie. Undaunted by hardship or by injury, Shipton and his team attempt to cross one of the great ice caps in Patagonia. It's impossible not to marvel at his determination, resilience and ap...

Some of the world's foremost historians - from Morris Bishop and J. Christopher Herold to H. R. Trevor-Roper and Barbara Tuchman - tell the stories of the greatest showdowns of all time. Here, Richard the Lionheart faces off against the sultan Saladin, Pope Leo I against Attila the Hun, Spanish Explorer Hernán Cortés against Aztec King Moctezuma II, and Emperor Napoleon against Russia's Alexander I. The collection ends with the 1904 standoff between President Teddy Roosevelt and Moroccan d...

John F. Kennedy glimmers through history as the young, idealistic president whose Camelot administration promised a new dawn for America. He did a great deal in his 1,000-day presidency, from embracing civil rights and starting the Peace Corps to negotiating a nuclear test ban and facing down the Soviets on the brink of nuclear war. But fifty years after he was murdered, it's hard to separate the real JFK, with all his faults, from the many myths about him. This is his story - and why he m...