Marco Pantani holds the record for the quickest ascent of Alpe d’Huez, perhaps the most famous climb in road cycling. Not only that, but he also holds two of the next four fastest times. What’s sad is that all of these times were, almost certainly, set with the help of EPO, a drug that increases [...]
“Ah, I remember you: you’re the guy who lost the Tour by eight seconds!” – “No monsieur, I’m the guy who won it twice.” Despite winning the world’s greatest cycling race twice, Laurent Fignon is still famous as the man who lost to Greg LeMond by just eight seconds in over three thousand kilometres and 87 [...]
David Millar is one of the best cyclists Britain has ever produced. He is also an admitted drug cheat. Although a good percentage of the public assumes that every professional cyclist is a cheat, today the sport is probably cleaner than it’s ever been, and Millar has played a big part in helping it clean [...]
Ned Boulting is an irritating bloke who pops up asking stupid and obvious questions of footballers on the telly. Some time ago, he began doing the same thing for the biggest event in cycling: the Tour de France. This book is the story of how he went from knowing nothing about it to being able [...]
Just over six months ago, I started commuting to work by bike again after many years away from the saddle. For some reason, this time was different and I gradually became more and more hooked on riding, gradually metamorphosing from a sedentary public transport user into a lycra-clad road warrior.
It’s All About the Bike
Robert PennPenguin [...]
Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize with this short novel last year. He’s a writer I admire, but mainly because of his wonderful memoir Nothing To Be Afraid Of rather than for his fiction. While his style is beautifully precise, I find the content of his fiction rather bland.
The Sense of an Ending
Julian BarnesJonathan [...]
Gustav Mahler is not the only great artist who needs to be celebrated at the moment. Earlier today, the Man Booker International Prize 2011 was awarded to Philip Roth for his entire body of work. Roth is one of the most prolific writers of what we seem forced to call ‘literary fiction’, most of which [...]
Today is the 100th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s death, so there could be no more appropriate time to review Bruno Walter’s highly personal book about his friend and mentor.
I found it in a beautifully preserved first edition on a recent trip to Hay-on-Wye and read it in no time at all. It’s a very slim [...]
Pasternak’s novel is largely famous in the West because of David Lean’s film adaptation of it, and that’s a great, great shame. Although I greatly admire Lean’s masterpiece, Lawrence of Arabia, his Doctor Zhivago is an intolerably schmaltzy, romanticised version of the book, in love with image rather than word, in a way that I can’t [...]
This book is probably only for those who already have a reasonably good grasp of the music of the late 1800s and early 1900s, but those who do will find a brilliant analysis that gives some very familiar music a new fascination.
German Modernism
Walter FrischUniversity of California Press 2007, Paperback, 332 pages, £20.95
Frisch starts with a wonderful analysis [...]
