It was quite a relief to discover that the first woman to climb Mont Blanc was Maria Paradis, an 18-year-old Chamonix chambermaid who got to the top in 1809. At least the all-conquering nineteenth-century English who left a trail of firsts and mighty tomes to celebrate their Alpine triumphs, were denied this little feminist coup.

Jim Ring has successfully plundered them all, not forgetting Murray's Handbook , to produce an exciting, anecdotal account of when men were Englishmen, mountains were the Alps and not much else mattered.

A little cold-water Christianity seemed to help of course, though not when later on this led devout travel enthusiasts such as Thomas Cook and Henry Lunn to start flooding the place with rail package tourists who could seem a bit 'orf'. Lunn got over this by setting up the Public Schools Alpine Sports Club to block-book chosen hotels and keep the hoi polloi out. As he himself wasn't a public school man he had also to let graduates and officers into his exclusive club.

Before all this and the climbers, there had been Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley who did more for the image of the Alps than any tourist board has ever managed.

John Ball, son of a Dublin Judge, who read natural sciences at Cambridge, and led the way up unclimbed peaks, regarded local guides as path-plodders and porters - a prejudice that lasted too long. Even Whymper, an engraver who climbed for climbing's sake rather than for scientific interest, was frowned on.

Lunn's son Arnold, who led the second charge up the mountains but this time to ski down them, developed the slalom race only to have the Norwegians, from whom some think he stole the idea, dismiss it as being for 'cissies'. We know better of course and being Englishmen as soon as the ladies started doing well on the Cresta run banned them and, on the ski slopes, set up separate-sex races to avoid embarrassments.