Those Who Dared

Those Who Dared is a collection of Guardian and Observer journalism covering tales of endurance and derring-do, from the past 200 years.

The Guardian and The Observer have always keenly reported the world of exploration and adventure travel,In the 19th century, they covered the British and European explorers who were trying to fill in the 'blanks on the map' - crossing deserts, racing to the poles, searching for the source of the Nile and trying to be the first to master the peaks of the Alps, and, later, the Himalaya. By the turn of the 20th century, interest turned to Everest, the 'third pole', to the deserts that needed to be conquered, and also to the new ways of exploring that opened up a whole new world of adventure - airships over the North Pole and Citroen driving across the Sahara in the 1920s, to name but two.

Those Who Dared, published by Guardian Books in October 2009, is a collection of the best of these tales of endurance and derring do, covering everything from Gordon Laing's doomed journey to Timbuctoo in 1828; Ernest Shackleton's months on the Antartcic ice; Wilfrid Thesiger's 1940s crossing of the Rub' al Khali to the race to put the first man in space.

Those Who Dared, the blog, will be musings and comments about tales of adventure in the media, plus material that didn't make it into the book.