Wonderful. Rum Doodle does for mountaineering what Three Men in a Boat did for Thames-going or Catch-22 did for the Second World War. It is simply an account of the leader of an expedition up Rum Doodle, a 40,000 and a half foot peak in the Himalayas, in the same way that Scoop is simply a tale about newsgathering in Africa. The tone is nearer to Pooter than anyone else I can think of, but the flavour is all W.E. Bowman's own.

I just love this book. Everything about it is nearly perfect... hugely enjoyable and brilliantly sustained.

Exceedingly funny... as if the hero of Diary of a Nobody had, in a mood of abandon, turned to mountaineering.

it is an epic. It is Homeric. It is inspiring. It is very, very funny... Read it and be moved.

Here is a noble revelation of the curel vulnerability of the body we live in without choice

Consistently enthralling...full of tart humour and dancing intelligence

Nobody who has followed him - one of the great writers of our time - thus far, should miss it

A great book, a necessary book

There is something magnificent about Philip Roth's undimmed rage and life-lust... As a body of work, these novels may have changed the way that readers think about their own mortality and may also have enlarged their sense of what it means to be a man; and one hopes that even E.I. Lonoff might consider that a fair tribute to the power of art

This is a book about the importance of literature that lasts