Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1886-1959) was one of the youngest members of Captain Scott's final expedition to the Antarctic. Cherry, despite his short sight, undertook an epic journey in the Antarctic winter to collect the eggs of the Emperor penguin. The temperature fell to 70 degrees below zero, it was dark all the time, his teeth shatterd in the cold and the tent blew away. "But we kept our tempers," Cherry wrote, "even with God". After serving in World War I, Cherry was invalided home, and with the encouragement of his neighbour, Bernard Shaw, he wrote about his adventures in "The Worst Journey in the World". This book freed Scott's story from the shackles of its period, and since its publication in 1922, the bitter brilliance and elegiac melancholy of Cherry's prose has touched the hearts of thousands of readers. In his work, Cherry transformed tragedy and grief into something fine. But he was to find that life is more complicated than literature, and as the years unravelled he faced a terrible struggle against depression, breakdown and despair, haunted by the possibility that he could have saved Scott and his companions.