In 1926 a Danish explorer six feet seven inches tall was buried alive in an Arctic blizzard, chiselled his way out with a tool made from his own frozen excrement, crawled three hours home over the ice, and took his gangrenous toes off with a pair of pliers. He had lived for fifteen years on seal, walrus and bear, and he went on to be the villain in an Oscar-winning film and win a television quiz show. Peter Freuchen went to Greenland at twenty, built a trading post on a bay at the top of the world and called it Thule, after the medieval name for the edge of the map. The Inuit called him Big Peter. He married a girl from the settlement called Navarana, dressed in bearskin trousers, drove dogs, hunted walrus from a skin boat, and ate what everyone around him ate: meat and blubber, raw and frozen as often as cooked, and nothing green for years at a time. He wrote that the Inuit were the happiest people on earth and that he had never been fitter. Then the storm. Alone with a sled, he dug into the snow to wait it out, and the snow set to ice around him. Thirty hours. His beard froze to the wall and he tore it free. Nothing to dig with. So he made something, waited for it to harden, and cut his way to the sky. The toes went that night. The leg went later, and he walked on a peg for the rest of his life, which was a long one: he wrote thirty books, fought the Nazis in Denmark and escaped a death sentence, consulted for a President, starred in Hollywood, and in 1956 took the top prize on The $64,000 Question in front of the whole of America. The man who did all of that was built on the diet every nutrition leaflet calls a death sentence. He was cremated and his ashes scattered on a hill above Thule, where the walrus still haul out and nobody has ever grown a vegetable.