Tim Moore (1) (1964–)

Growing up in Australia my knowledge of London was all-but restricted to the Monopoly board. Thus, I knew that Mayfair and Park Lane were out of my price range if I ever moved to London, I learnt how to pronounce "Pall Mall", I knew to avoid Old Kent Road and above all I wondered what on earth "The Angel, Islingdon" was (spoiler alert; it's a building that currently hosts a pub and bank).

If "Don't Pass Go" was around in the late seventies/early eighties it would have saved a lot of wondering show more on my behalf. Moore does a bang-up job filling in our knowledge of each of the Monopoly, giving context as to why a particular street or location was chosen and supplying the odd dab of self-depreciating humour to keep it rolling.

Of course, when I finally got to London a few decades after first encountering it on the Monopoly board, it didn't seem to have the same magic that the board game instilled in me. That's not Moore's fault though. show less

Tim Moore is always good for a laugh and "Frost on my moustache", his first book, is amongst his best. Moore heads off to points north, following in the footsteps of Lord Dufferin, who wrote a travel book about his adventures in and near the Arctic Circle.

Moore spends much of the book comparing himself with Dufferin with Moore coming up the worse. He recounts his trip on an England-Iceland ferry, which seemed to consist of him being violently ill the entire way, his journey around Iceland, show more complete with its hordes of miserly German cyclists, his close encounter with Jan Mayen and his visit to the wonderful Svalbard.

I re-read this recently prior to my trip to Iceland and while the Iceland that Moore visited is less than 20 years old, progress means you don't recognise a lot of what he writes. But then I didn't have an encounter with a miserly German cyclist so there's an upside. show less

This is my second go-around with Tim Moore but I also suspect that this is his last insane bike adventure as short of riding the length of the Great Wall of China on a unicycle it's hard to imagine how he's going to top this. To a large degree this is much less of a deranged trip mostly for the hell of it and more of a memoir taking stock of a life spent in the shadow of the Cold War and a revisit of how the immediate hopes that emerged in the wake of that conflict have been realized; or show more not. By the time Moore is done with this trip he's nodding in agreement with Vaclav Havel's belief that it's going to take several generations for the impacted societies to really recover from the whole sorry affair. If there is an issue with this book as an entertainment it's that it peaks early with Moore's misadventures in Finland, in March, north of the Arctic Circle; good times. show less

Funny. Funny. Funny. I like that Moore's writing is unapologetic snarky. If you are sensitive to sarcasm and foul language, stay away! This book is lightly peppered with words only a hearty rant could benefit from. Take a slightly out-of-shape, thirty something year old British guy who gets it into his head he can ride the Tour-de-France. Outfit him with a bike and ridiculous clothes and the fact he has no idea what he's doing. Suddenly you've got a beyond hilarious story. Tim Moore ignores show more all common sense reason and sets out to bike all 2,256 miles of the race before the actual professionals take the stage. Each chapter is a different leg of the Tour and what's great about Moore's account (aside from his incessant bellyaching) is the historical perspective he gives along the way. He isn't shy about providing graphic descriptions of the trials and tribulations of the male body after eight to ten hours in the saddle, either. I could open French Revolutions any page and find something hysterically funny, and more often than not, off color. show less