Rushdie memoir ignored by Samuel Johnson non-fiction Prize Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, by Wade Davis (The Bodley Head) Speaking at the Telegraph Hay Festival, Wade Davis explained how he was touched on the way that the Polar expeditions mirror the decline of the British empire and said that the effects of the First World War, for youngsters seeing so much carnage and death, cannot be underestimated on the psyche of the climbers and their rational acceptance of risk and death. War changed the gestalt of his death. And yet, reflected Davis, they represented a lost age of "decency, honour and grit." The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton) In The Telegraph Adam Nicolson wrote: "In some ways, this is a manifesto. By sinking deep into these places, the walker dissolves the difference between himself and the world he is walking though. But the word "environment" never occurs here, because it assumes a person distinct from the world around him. That is exactly the distinction that has to be dissolved. And walking can dissolve it because, according to Macfarlane, "The body knows things in ways that the conscious mind cannot." The Better Angels of our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity, by Steven Pinker (Allen Lane) In the Sunday Telegraph Hugo Slim wrote: "Pinker argues at great length - with hundreds of charts and dozens of psychology experiments on students and rats - that "the decline of violence may be the most significant and under-appreciated development in the history of our species." His data sets and Enlightenment reasoning are indeed a source of real encouragement. The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, by Paul Preston (HarperPress) In the Telegraph Jeremy Treglown wrote: "This is the background, too, to Professor Preston's meticulous cataloguing of atrocities in The Spanish Holocaust, which won the History Prize of Catalonia when it appeared in Spain last year. Drawing on the work of Spanish historians as well as his own research, Preston has dreadful things to relate, and not only about the well-documented tortures and rapes and mass murders of 1936. Spanish historians, with media assistance, have brought to light cases in which babies born to imprisoned Republicans were taken from them and given or sold to childless Nationalist couples. Now some of these elderly changelings are having to confront their real pasts, which everyone seems to agree is always a good thing. Strindberg: A Life, by Sue Prideaux (Yale University Press) Claudia FitzHerbert wrote in the Telegraph: "Prideaux is a deft guide to the absinthe-heavy bohemian underworlds of Berlin and Paris which Strindberg inhabited for much of the 1890s. As for the misogyny, she deals with the charge by avoiding the label as she describes her subject's transformation from passionate emancipator to paranoid would-be jailer. David Willetts MP, chair of the judges, comments: "The titles on this year's shortlist have all impressed the judges with their originality and high quality of writing. Each of them communicates complex themes, and in a way that is both enlightening and entertaining. These are significant books which have the ability to change our view of the world and which we believe will make a lasting contribution to their genres. Their broad range of subject matter reflects the diversity of English-language non-fiction, and has the potential to inspire readers of all interests. The shortlist has been chosen by the Rt Hon David Willetts MP, Minister for Universities and Science (chair of judges); writer and biographer Patrick French; Paul Laity, literary journalist; Bronwen Maddox, editor, Prospect magazine; and philosopher Raymond Tallis. The winner of the prize, which will be announced on 12 November, will receive £20,000.