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“Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised,” wrote Antarctic explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard. So it follows that polar literature is replete with gripping real-life tales of heroism and disaster that – if they were fiction – would seem too outlandish.

If you want to sample a smorgasbord of these works, and , are excellent places to start. These are the paperback editions of the 2007 book , now distilled into two anthologies.

Capturing the frigid beauty of the polar wilderness, the anthologies span the earliest expeditions to the present day – and even the future, with an extract from Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1997 novel , set in 2016.

The books also include extracts from classics such as , Ernest Shackleton’s and from the book that gets my vote for the best polar literature of all time: Cherry-Garrard’s .

Read all the reviews in our Christmas Books Special