Book of a lifetime: Coronation Everest

From The Independent archive: Simon Winchester on a magical account of mountaineering history

Edmund Hillary (left), Tensing Norgay (right) and expedition leader Colonel John Hunt in Kathmandu, Nepal, after descending from Everest in 1953 (PA)

Of course, the jacket today would be quite unacceptable. Simple, pale blue, elegant in the way all Faber jackets have always been – and dominated by a photograph of a splendidly bearded old man, tribally decked out in some turbaned Himalayan fashion, reading a copy of The Times.

But then you look more closely, and realise that the unfortunate man is reading what cannot possibly be read, since what he is seeing is the front page turned quite upside down! What a capital joke! We tricked the old devil! Poor heathen fellow. Today, naturally, the jacket would be seen as a racially-charged and imperially-freighted infelicity – though half-a-century ago, I would never have noticed it.

Maybe it was, but this is a book that I nevertheless can say, without hesitation, completely changed my life. I had borrowed a copy from the British Council Library in what was then called Fort Portal, in western Uganda. I was a geologist at the time; I was prospecting for copper deposits, with a determined want of success, in the foothills of the Ruwenzori Mountains. I lived in a tent near a village called Kyenjojo, and spent all my evenings reading.