SOURCE: “No Longer Hero or Villain,” in Spectator, January 4, 1992, pp. 25-26.

In the following review Linklater offers praise for The Birthday Boys.

The fall of a hero produces a curiously intense sensation—a surge of libertarian delight pitted against pangs of filial anguish until both are swamped by cynicism. Those at least were the emotions I remember from reading Roland Huntford's admirable demolition job on Scott of the Antarctic, Scott and Amundsen, about ten years ago.

It brought down a figure epitomising the gentlemanly virtues of courage, generosity and a masculine resolution which endured without self-pity to the end. In its place stood a vain, impractical creature, racked by feminine irresolution, whose short-comings in preparation and equipment were exposed, cruelly by the hard-headed Amundsen in the race to the South Pole, and fatally by the Antarctic cold on their journey back.

Years of hero-worshipping made it impossible to...