The magisterial¹ first instalment of a two-part biography about a man who towered over American foreign policy for more than two decades, and still divides opinion as no one else does.

 

 

A highly readable account, as moving as it is unexpected, of what flying means, by an airline pilot with a gift for words.

 

 

It is hard to write a literary account of Ted Hughes without writing about the life, as many authors have found. Five years in the making, this biography began as an authorised life only to become unauthorised when the author fell out with Hughes's widow, Carol, over how much personal detail to include, prompting the poet's estate to withdraw its co-operation.

 

 

Explorer, polymath, friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson and Simon Bolívar, Alexander von Humboldt was one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century. His ideas are as relevant today as they ever were.

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