Explores our ideas of the wild. This book also tells the story of a friendship, and of a loss. It mixes history, memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance.

Why do so many feel compelled to risk their lives climbing mountains? During the climbing season, one person a day dies in the Alps, and more people die climbing in this season in Scotland than they do on the roads. This title pursues an investigation into our responses to mountains, and how these have changed over the last few centuries.

At first the virus wiping out grass and crops is of little concern to John Custance. It has decimated Asia, causing mass starvation and riots, but Europe is safe and a counter-virus is expected any day. Except, it turns out, the governments have been lying to their people.

Set in the south of England, this book captures the soft-handed, city-dweller's naivety and wonder both at the workings of nature and the toughness of life on a farm. It contains sections on whatever happens to take the author's fancy and inspire his thoughtful curiosity.

A guide to outdoor swimming in Britain from the Outer Hebrides to the Isles of Scilly . It contains information for would-be adventurers to make their own journeys, with over 300 referenced swim spots.

Compiled by Charles Dickens, Mugby Junction is a intriguing composite of tales ranging from horror to a realistic portrayal of life around a bustling Victorian railway station. Published for the first time in its entirety, it contains one of Dickens's most celebrated ghost stories, The Signalman.

A sharply observed elegy for a disappearing predator and its wilderness habitat.

A wide-ranging and elegantly written study of how nineteenth-century culture thought about, and thought with, the idea of originality. It reveals how plagiarism was not only a theoretical concern of Victorian commentators on literature, but also provided a creative resource for many important writers including Eliot, Dickens, Pater, and Wilde.

The name John Muir has come to stand for the protection of wild land and wilderness in both America and Britain. Muir's writings of his summer in what would become the great national park of Yosemite in California's Sierra valley raise a close awareness of nature to a spiritual dimension.

Explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath, to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex, and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, this book presents the journeys which become the conductors of people and cultures who have had intense relationships with these places.

Reportage resists easy definition and comes in many forms, but it reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know. This book is a journey from tumbleweed and American Indian tepees to the house where Bonnie and Clyde did their dirty work to the scene of the murders in Capote's In Cold Blood .