Join him as he explores the history of cycling and France just five years after WWI - meeting characters like Henri Pélissier, who won the Tour that year but who would within the decade be shot dead by his lover using the same pistol with which his wife had killed herself. It feels like, amidst the worry of the pandemic, when things felt so uncertain, this quest kept him sane. This book was seriously boring to the point where I skipped some of it and didn't bother reading to the end. Ned set about learning everything he could about the sequence – studying each frame, face and building – until he had squeezed the meaning from it.

In case you think that Gallica has simply miss-captioned the images – it happens – reports from the Critérium des Aiglons can be found in Le Miroir des Sports, including another photograph taken that same afternoon, similar to one of the other photographs available on Gallica. 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. On the left, one of the Agence Rol images that can be found on Gallica, on the right a similar image from the pages of Le Miroir des Sports in August 1923. Photograph: Ed Marshall/Alamy View image in fullscreen Mysterious beauty: the daymark on St Martin's, Isles of Scilly, whose coastline is explored in The Draw of the Sea.Several people have tried to find out more about her but all we’ve been able to learn at this stage comes from a couple of races before her Hour record and a couple of races after. If you are a fan of Le Tour de France, and have a vague feeling that you really should know more of the turbulent history of Europe than you do then this is the book for you. A random auction purchase, combined with the stresses of COVID isolation, and we are taken back to midsummer 1923.

And so – in the same way that, today, Bianchi and Peugeot and Gitane are owned by the same company – Alcyon had subsidiary brands in its portfolio. A previously unseen film of an early Tour de France bought at auction inspires Ned Boulting to unearth the story behind the people, places and times captured on film. A story about how an obscure piece of Tour de France film from 1923 shapes Boulting’s covid years and shines a certain light on what was happening a hundred years and ago and what is happening now. Had the book concentrated on the riders, the pieces in the film and the riders, it would have been a much better read.For all the slight contrivances, Bradley builds a poignant, quiet and affecting novel full of love as well as loss. A quite fascinating account of the laborious investigation of the detail surrounding an obscure forgotten cyclist deserving of his place from obscurity to at least some recognition of his accomplishments. The roots of the Tour were in a battle for supremacy between competing papers, and egos, as well as an urge to teach the French about their own nation – “France was still in the process of convincing its constituent parts… that it was indeed a whole and coherent entity”.