So who the heck is Mo Anthoine – and what, for the matter of that, is the Rat? A lot of books came out of the mid-20th Century British climbing boom, including well-selling autobiographies of Bonington and Joe Brown. This one is a bit different.

First of all, it was not written to pay for the author's next climbing expedition. It was not even written by the climber. Al Alvarez is known, if he's known at all, as a poet and literary journalist – I came across him in the 1960s, as compiler of a superb anthology, the Penguin 'New Poetry'. (Is there some mystic correspondence between rock climbing and early 20th century verse? The previous excellent anthology, 'The Faber Book of Modern Verse', was compiled by Alpine climber Michael Roberts.)

Unless you were around at the time, Mo Antoine is the member of the Joe Brown group you maybe haven't heard of. With a steady job running Joe Brown's gear factory in Llanberis he didn't need to write a potboiler called 'Hoy There!' or 'It's All Ogre Now'. Alvarez's biography was written (very well written) for fun, and as a tribute to his friend.

Just like most Scottish winter climbs, the result's a bit mixed.

Anthoine was one of the 'other two' on the Bonington-Scott epic on the Ogre. After Scott broke both his ankles, it was Anthoine and the fourth climber, Clive Rowlands, who got the expedition down again. You may have attended one of Doug Scott's Ogre slideshows, in which case you'll have seen the picture of Scott crawling down the mountain, with Antoine crouched beside him. But you need to read the 'Rat' to find out why. "As he crept past, I thought, if he's crawling, he can carry [all these extra karabiners]."

The Ogre chapter is the most revealing of the various Ogre stories around, with ironic details missing from other accounts. (I don't think Clive Rowland has written it up, though I might be wrong about that.) The other hot chapter is a vivid account of the ordinary route on the Old Man of Hoy. Al Alvarez, a not especially talented 56-year-old climber, follows as second on the rope up what was probably his lifetime-most-thrilling ascent. Or maybe not: an earlier chapter describes an underequipped chilly bivvy on the north face of the Cima Grande.

There's another chapter the PR company for Snowdon Mouldings (Joe Brown's helmet-making factory in Llanberis) must have enjoyed a lot, the rest of us less so. And there's an account of an unsuccessful Everest expedition. Not spectacularly unsuccessful. Not lethally unsuccessful. Just a whole lot of folk waiting at the bottom of the North East ridge for a weather window that doesn't happen. This could be the only fully truthful account of what Everest is all about.

And the Rat? The rat is that other climber inside you, the one that thinks you're spectacularly adventurous and skilful. "When they come close to each other, that's smashing, that is." And so it's necessary, from time to time, to feed the Rat with suitably serious and exciting climbs.

Well, it is if you're Mo Anthoine.