1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession

Product Information

Menmuir uses all the poetic storytelling techniques honed in his Booker-longlisted career to imbue the wonderful The Draw of the Sea with a keen sense of place and purpose. This manic on-this-day-in-history ‘Not The 1923 Tour’ strand takes up a large part of 1923 and when you join the dots – see the pattern! A great example of what constitutes the best longform writing about sport - The New European You may also be interested in. Even with added adjectives you can see that a written description of two-and-a-half-minutes of film won’t fill a 300-page book.

Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. Boulting leading himself astray is one thing, but when he then tries to take his readers with him down some duff history cul-de-sac, that’s a problem. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. Ultimately, it’s the enthusiasm that proves most beguiling here, not only for doggedly uncovering facts with extremely limited clues, but for bringing back to the light a remote, unsung figure and honouring his life – and career – even though it wasn’t one of garlands or headlines.There’s the Seznec affaire, in which someone gets murdered and that is somehow linked to the very day of the Pathé newsreel by virtue of some piece of paperwork or other being signed by someone on that day. There is in part real-world, real-time sleuthing, as I drag my project into the light of the day, a century later.

A scrap of newsreel film, a century old and two and a half minutes long, sweeps Ned Boulting back not just into the world of a forgotten hero of the Tour de France but into the forces that shaped that world: a collision of sport, war, family and destiny.Bradley struck gold with his debut, The Cat and the City; stories of loneliness in Tokyo connected by a strange, recurring cat. The juxtaposition of the two worlds a century apart, and the tying together of assorted historical loose threads makes for an entertaining read, not just for cycling enthusiasts. The places he has taken it by the end of the book are a really nice way to cap it off and they give readers some form of closure. It wasn’t Pélissier but this “Beckmann” – actually the Belgian Théo Beeckman – who most captivates Boulting, however.