For the rest of that day, until a tawny owl passed over at 9.23pm, each bird is briefly brought to life with John’s observations and fascinating backstories: their nests, their eggs, their battles, their triumphs.

Sound recordist Alex Byng and photographer David White were with John throughout this red-letter day – which anyone can replicate in their own garden, using the Merlin bird ID app to help identify bird songs and confirm sightings. 

Includes practical succinct advice on creating an insect-friendly garden, the bedrock of successful wildlife conservation.

Fired up by the accounts of exploring parties in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers of the weird and supernatural began to construct a literary Arctic and Antarctic in which terrors lay undiscovered in the ice and gateways to bizarre hidden worlds were waiting. From James Hogg’s lurid North Pole narrative of life amongst polar bears in ‘The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon’ to tales of mad science and ghostly visitations among the wind-blown expanse of the southern continent, this new collection showcases a wealth of neglected material and an overlooked niche of literature obsessed with the limits of human experience.

Pulp tales of alien forces emerging from the ice and a battle between hunter and invisible man-eating duck creature drift alongside modern horror from indigenous Arctic voices to show the extent and endurance of the lure of these sublime landscapes.