SOURCE: A review of The Birthday Boys, in New Scientist, April 11, 1992, p. 43.

In the following review, Cross offers tempered assessment of The Birthday Boys.

Well into the 1960s, my schoolmasters solemnly taught that Amundsen—he merited neither rank nor Christian name—beat Captain Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole only by the most dastardly trickery.

Luckily, no era set itself up for debunking quite as much as the final decades of the British Empire. By the 1970s, the line “I am just going outside and may be some time,” had launched a thousand comic sketches. In 1979, Roland Huntford's Scott and Amundsen (later republished as The Last Place On Earth) completed the job by portraying Scott as a self-deluding romantic whose incompetence cost lives.

Beryl Bainbridge leans heavily on Huntford and the more veiled criticism of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World for her fictional first-person...