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Greg Hackett - Editorial Expert
An avid crime and thriller reader when younger Greg is now more interested in non-fiction and in particular books which explain the natural world and our relationship with it. You will also find the biographies of extraordinary people propping up his reading list which is unsurprising as his career has mostly been in live events where he has had the opportunity to hear many remarkable human stories in person. Most recently Greg has founded the London Mountain Film Festival which shares the inspiring experiences of remarkable people doing amazing things in incredible places. He is also a publisher of gifts for hill-walkers and an enthusiastic but challenged home-brewer.
Through the rigorous process of becoming a dog handler for a Mountain Rescue Team (MRT) in the Peak District, Paul Besley and his dog, Scout, navigate the trials and joys of life together. The relationship between collie and master is unconditional and unwavering. Although the heart of the book details their training, assessments, graduation, and eventual call-outs, the earlier and later chapters frame this transition with themes of hope and loss.
The author is an incredible person, but of course, the most impressive people don’t always see themselves that way. His has been a difficult life—violence ... View Full Review
Peter Donaldson’s And the Winner Is runs, throws and dribbles us through the entire 70-year history of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year (SPOTY) and those pivotal moments that have defined British sporting culture. Donaldson allows every award to act as an anchor point to its specific year—a trigger to recall not only the achievements of the recipient but the wider landscape of British sport, shaped by triumphs, challenges, and social shifts.
Perhaps this is the nature of an institution such as SPOTY: it doesn’t just record history; it becomes history—... View Full Review
My exposure to 'Gen Z' has mostly been through my children which means that on top of it being mystifying, it's also terrifying. Any chance of getting a normal job? Have you thought about your pension? Forget it. Erifili Gounari’s Design Your Life was the penny dropping - this book isn’t just career advice, it’s a guide for young people rewriting the rules on work, life, and success.
What really struck me is it’s no longer about the titles, the big office, or the traditional markers we may have aimed for. For ... View Full Review
Over the past year, conversations around the potential demise of cash in society have become more frequent in my circles, particularly among those in rural communities. The perspectives vary—some people appreciate the freedom of cash, while others raise concerns about exclusion, surveillance, and control in a cashless society.
My own initial stance was pragmatic. The convenience of digital transactions seemed obvious, especially as technologies like PayPal, cryptocurrency, and smartphone banking make handling physical cash feel almost quaint. However, Fintech Wars expanded my understanding of this transition, revealing both the industry’s current momentum and its underlying complexities.&... View Full Review
Martyn Ashton’s life took a dramatic turn when a spinal injury during a stunt left him paralysed from the waist down, right at the height of his career. In a single moment, everything he had worked for literally snapped. However, Joyride is not a story about loss, but one of remarkable transformation and triumph in the face of adversity.
At the heart of the book lies that pivotal moment of his injury, a life-changing event that could have easily broken him. But what makes Martyn’s story so compelling is his response. In Joyride, he typically downplays ... View Full Review
John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World is a gripping account of the 2016 wildfire that ravaged Fort McMurray, Alberta, forcing the evacuation of 90,000 people. The cover notes inform that Vaillant is a cinematic writer, and they aren’t kidding. At times this reads like the script for a disaster movie, as we become acquainted with a place and its characters, knowing all the time that a monster is out there in the woods and it’s heading this way. The fact that the city is built on the riches of our petrochemical ... View Full Review
Over the past few decades the experience of visiting bothies (mostly abandoned farm buildings in remote Scottish areas maintained as shelters for walkers) has gone from an underground, almost cultish activity, to one which is more publicly known and shared by people with a wider variety of reasons to be there. Kat Hill’s Bothy is an exploration of this, offering a heady blend of history, nature writing, and personal reflection.
Hill, a historian with a PhD from the University of Oxford, brings a dose of academic rigour to the world of bothy literature which has previously been more ... View Full Review
If anyone else had written a book about exploring the area around where they live it may not have landed quite as well as this one by Alastair Humphreys, who has cycled around the world, rowed the Atlantic and undertaken all manner of further adventures, macro and micro in his search for... what exactly? In Local, he gets to the bottom of it, because here on his home patch he unlocks countless stories of nature, history, the marvels of the universe, you name it and more besides, and you wonder in the end why he bothered going anywhere! But of ... View Full Review
Sometimes science will make discoveries that change the world, but sometimes it is just about how we look at those big leaps forward. In his latest landmark work, The Genetic Book of the Dead, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins holds Darwinism to the light and reveals the potential of natural selection to not only explain how creatures look and behave the way that they do in order to survive in their environments, but also to explain past environments, distant kingdoms, and use anatomy and cellular biology to explain these unseen landscapes.
Every book marks a moment in time, when all within ... View Full Review
A travel book in which someone walks the length of Spain is something of a niche within a niche within a niche. Mark Eveleigh’s colourful and eventful 1200km trip from Gibraltar in the south to Galicia in the north is a worn shoe-in for the travel section, but inside that genre it has a place in walking books, and from there it is nudging up against literature for the adventure market. Vagabond earns a place on all these shelves, but it does beg the question, How many people will read this in planning to walk the length of ... View Full Review
Finding Your Feet is the Why? How? And Where? of Rhiane Fatinikun’s journey to fulfilment, and her gift to people like her who have been marginalised and othered by the world of adventure. As a middle-aged white man quite active in this space I qualify for what Rhiane at one point termed the ‘Beige Pants Brigade’ and here I am sat in them reading her book. It’s an inspiring story. What started out as a shout out to other Black women to meet for a walk, became a movement which drew thousands of followers, ... View Full Review
Ned Boulting’s Tour de France commentary is an institution for fans of the race and when Covid disrupted his annual gig, like many of us, he was vulnerable to any distraction from lockdown madness. In his case that came in the form of a two minute reel of Pathé news footage covering his beloved race at some point around one hundred years ago. On a tip-off he picked it up at an auction. He had no idea what he was buying, and certainly not where it would take him.
In the pages of 1923, Ned goes on a ... View Full Review
