How the English Made Alps

Jim Ring tells the remarkable story of the English love affair with the Alps, from its beginnings in the early Romantic movement, when poets such as Byron and Shelley wrote of the mountains with awed delight, through the great days of the 1850s and 1860s and the formation of the Alpine Club, to the inter-war years when the English assured the future prosperity of the alpine resorts by virtually inventing and then popularizing downhill-skiing. It is a story full of rivalries, from the conquest of the Matterhorn in 1865 to the competition between the pioneering travel agents Thomas Cook and Henry Lunn, who opened the Alps to ordinary people and dominated early travel.Part history, part biography, How the English Made the Alps brings the characters in this saga vividly to life - the artists, scientists and gentleman-adventurers who first explored the Alps, the invalids who flocked there in search of health, and the aristocrats, eccentrics and mountain-scramblers who followed. It suggests that English alpinism was both an expression of and a reaction to Britain's great imperial age - a spirit perfectly embodied by the man who died on Everest and who may have been its first conqueror, George Leigh Mallory.

Pagina's: 298, Hardcover, John Murray Publishers Ltd