Anthony King is the Professor of War Studies at the University of Exeter. In his day job, he writes about the armed forces and war in the 21st century. He has worked on infantry close combat, command, urban warfare and, at the moment, he is interested in AI; are killer robots going to kill us all? In his spare time, though he is also a keen rock-climber; he also fell-runs, skis, and surfs whenever he can. He likes being outside. He started rock-climbing way back in the early 1980s when he was a boy; Al Alvarez, the poet, writer, and critic used to take him and Luke, his son, to Harrison’s Rocks in Kent. His new book, Ascent: the rise of British rock-climbing, tells the story of the remarkable evolution of a once wild and arcane mountain adventure into a professionalised, commercialised, global sport. It begins with Toby Roberts gold medal at the Paris Olympics in 2024, before returning to 1951, when two young Mancunian climbers, Joe Brown and Don Whillans, put up a stunning new route, called Cemetery Gates in Llanberis Pass. The book is not a conventional history of rock-climbing, a route-by-route account. It is a thematic and investigative. It tries to explain how climbing evolved by reference to wider social changes; it relates advances in the sport to economic, social, and technological developments in the UK. In the past, he was a sports sociologist who studied the transformation of English and European football in the 1990s. That knowledge informed the narrative. At the same time, the book incorporates his own experiences of the sport. He wants to try to communicate what it means to be a climber – and what it feels like to be out there in space on a route: the fear and the elation.
Contact details: a.c.king@exeter.ac.uk
Instagram: @antbruceking