Craig B.

The Man Who Would Be King is an enormously popular story by the legendary British writer, poet, and journalist Rudyard Kipling. In the tale, the narrator—a British newspaperman in India modeled after Kipling himself—meets two ex-military rogues named Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan, who have grand ambitions. They plan to load up on weapons, travel to the remote Afghan kingdom of Kafiristan and—through cunning and military force—become monarchs.

Perpetually covered in ice and snow, the mountainous Antarctic Peninsula stretches southward toward the South Pole where it merges with the largest and coldest mass of ice anywhere on the planet. Yet far from being an otherworldly "Pole Apart", the region has the most contested political history of any part of the Antarctic Continent. In Frozen Empires, Adrian Howkins argues that there has been a fundamental continuity in the ways in which imperial powers have used the environment to support their political claims in the Antarctic Peninsula region.