Raymond Carr
Wheeling And Dealing
Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France, 1903-2003
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Simon & Schuster 378pp £16.99
EVERY SUMMER SOME 200 professional cyclists set out to race over 3,000 kilometres round France in the most gruelling test of mental and physical endurance in the world of sport.
What Geoffrey Wheatcroft achleves in Le Tour is to set the race in its political and social context. An accomplished historian, he is also a journahst, Gee from the professional historian's concern for the approval of his academic colleagues. If he sometimes tests his readers with detailed accounts of individual tours, he refi-eshes them with his chapters on the towns and provinces through which the Tour passes. Wheatcroft is a connoisseur of France's history, its art and literature, and its food. As the Tour passes Grenoble he reminds us that it was there that Stendhal acquired his hatred for his father and the bourgeoisie. Normandy 'intersperses beautiful buildings with sumptuous meals'. Its capital, Rouen, was the scene of Madame Bovary's fatal carriage ride. At the fictional seaside resort of Balbec Proust's narrator imagined Albertine's friends as the 'very young mistresses of professional cyclists': an indication of the social salience of cycling in the years before the Great War.
It is Wheatcroft's astonishing expert knowledge of other competitive spectator sports that allows him to set
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
When @djbduncan notices the text for a literary jigsaw puzzle had been written by a former colleague, his head spins. A wild surmise. Are jigsaws REF-able?
Dennis Duncan - The W Factor
Dennis Duncan: The W Factor
literaryreview.co.uk
In an effort to scold drinkers, Victorian temperance societies furiously marked every drinking establishment with a red X on city maps. It was a spectacular case of propaganda backfiring.
@foxtosser explores the history of drink maps
Edward Brooke-Hitching - From Beer Street to Gin Lane
Edward Brooke-Hitching: From Beer Street to Gin Lane - Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler
literaryreview.co.uk
How did a workers’ insurance agent who died of tuberculosis at the age of forty become a global literary icon?
@MortenHoiJensen on Kafka's metamorphosis
Morten Høi Jensen - Paranoid Humanoid
Morten Høi Jensen: Paranoid Humanoid - Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka by Karolina Watroba; Kafka: Making o...
literaryreview.co.uk