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Why do lone sailors do it? “I haven’t the faintest idea,” admits Amyr Kink, introducing Between Two Poles (Bloomsbury, £16.99 ISBN 0 7475 1972 2) a diary of his two-year trip to Spitsbergen and the Antarctic. Nor, at the end, has the reader. Except maybe in the moment near Drake’s Passage, where he sees the “green flash” which appears just occasionally, as the last splinter of sunset disappears. “I yelled: ‘I saw it! I saw it!’ A fraction of a second that was worth the whole journey,” he writes. But, just as suddenly, the inspiration is gone. The rest though sharply descriptive of nature and marine technology alike, is oddly distant, as if he just wanted to be alone.