Upland

Glorious … a beguiling history … Ed Douglas’s achievement in this excellent book is to return a proper sense of colour and even carnival to Britain’s high places . . The truth is that mountains have shaped much of our island story … One delight of his capacious … narrative is the room it leaves for delightful cameos by remarkable individuals – Kathryn Hughes * Guardian ** Book of the Day ** *
Engrossing … a must-read for anyone with an interest in past, present and future of Britain’s mountains … wonderful … rich in detail and incident … a nuanced, clear-eyed and informative picture * Scotsman *
Rich and adventurous … always smart and well informed * Literary Review *
Britain’s mountains have rich, dramatic human histories that linger to this day … untold, eye-opening stories of conflict and control surrounding our wildest places * Independent *
The mountains, constant and unchanging on any human scale, are a good lens through which to view our preoccupations … Douglas’s central message is right: we cannot separate ourselves from the landscape; it is place that makes people – Adam Weymouth * Sunday Times *
A heady and exciting time-lapse of British history mapped onto the land’s topography … Highly readable and approachable … A fully absorbable chronicle … as dramatic as any Victorian novel … The kind of book to return to again and again * Cumbria Life *
This book is completely enthralling and original – and can only have been written by someone with a profound love of our uplands. The sense of time through geology and of space through elevation gives the book an epic scale; readers are left in no doubt that uplands are a unique witness to our island story and to many of our natural predicaments. Our fragile landscapes have a fine new biographer – Nicholas Crane, author of Latitude
Deeply researched and authoritative, Douglas has produced a definitive history of the peoples, cultures and lands of our rocky isles from the most magisterial and far-seeing perspective. Every page holds a fascinating nugget – I learned so much – Gaia Vince, author of Nomad Century
Our hills and mountains, though scattered, are a kingdom of their own. Nobody has ever gathered into a book their human story, their geography, their past and their future, before. Ed Douglas has achieved this with elegance and passion – Matthew Parris
Beautifully written – Laura Spinney, author of Proto
Douglas’s analysis is broad, deep, and brought to life with human stories. Its conclusions are profound … the book also earns the hope of its subtitle * Critic *

Ed Douglas is a prize-winning writer about mountains. His books include Himalaya: A Human History, which was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, Kinder Scout: The People’s Mountain, and a biography of Tenzing Norgay. He won the Boardman Tasker Award for mountain literature in 2010.

He has been a climber for forty-five years and was, for a decade, the editor of mountaineering’s oldest publication, the Alpine Journal. He lives in Sheffield.

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