This was probably one of those books that seemed like a good idea at the time: an anthology of ‘the ways in which writers around the world have imaginatively explored – and sometimes invented – the Earth’s most remote and mysterious continent’.

The Wide White Page must have been a mammoth research task for Bill Manhire, but he pulls it off. Some of the writing is entertainingly bad, some of it is good, and often it is sublime. There are poems aplenty, including Scott’s Impressions On The March and Edward Wilson’s wonderful The Barrier Silence (‘The Silence was deep with a breath like sleep, as our sledge runners slid on the snow’).

Some of the writers are familiar – such as HP Lovecraft and Pablo Neruda – but it was often the writing of lesser-known authors that gripped me, such as the two stories by eco-thriller writer Kim Stanley Robinson.

Just the ticket for these unseasonably cold evenings, with the Christmas tree lights twinkling and a soothing glass of Taylors’ 10-Year-Old Tawny to hand.