Graeme Fife

I enjoyed the early chapters a lot – he is great on growing up and the escape a bicycle offers. The years at university and just after are also fascinating, but from then on it becomes a bit hit-and-miss.

He is an opinionated and spirited writer, and you know he would be good company on a long ride, but the endless stories about rides he has done and coffee shops he has frequented lose their charm for the reader long before the author tires of them.

Angel of the Assassination is a rambling, dull as ditchwater excuse for historical fiction. One suspects that the author didn't have enough information in order to compile a work of any substance regarding Charlotte Corday. Or, conversely, the author was inundated by unimportant miscellanea that was spun out into pages upon pages of irrelevant reflection and pointless dialogue. Also, the text itself needed some going over by a proofreader to boot. Poorly done.

The thrills and spills of the greatest bike race in the world. All human life is in this book and the battles against the terrain. The story is told through those big mountain stages, where the drama unfolds, and then the later chapters the recent tours by years. The book is written at a lively pace and brings the rides such as up L'Alpe D'Huez etc vividly to life. Could not put this book down once I had started it.

Inside the Peloton by Graeme Fife. Fife – a prolific cycling writer – manages to combine both the sense of the sport and how it works, as well as the history of the race and most of the ‘grands’, the riders who have dominated it.

http://aroundtheedges.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/some-of-the-best-books-on-bike-ra...