The prize-winning British writer and climber Ed Douglas, whose last book was Himalaya: A Human History, returns to peaks nearer home for his latest, Upland: The Strange History and Vital Future of Britain’s Mountains (The Bodley Head, £25). In the current issue of the Literary Review, Richard Smyth says it’s “a rich and adventurous book”. “The hills,” he writes, “are not always central to Douglas’s histories, but they are always there, a presence at the edge, an age-old counterweight to the north and west of the historiographical mainstream. The result is not so much a history of our uplands as a history of early Britain with the uplands left in.”