Spotty, as it must be when it's covering a hundred and odd years of a complex event in 250 pages, but some stories crop up several times (the tale of Eugène Christophe's broken front forks seems to be repeated at every mention of the Col du Tourmalet; it's a good story, but the nice thing about books is you can read them more than once), and others which might've been worth a mention don't appear at all. For example, Brownlee mentions that Pierre Brambilla, having lost the 1947 Tour on the very last day, buried his bike in his back garden out of digust, which is one of those "how curious" one-sentence bits of nonsense that you immediately forget. But in Something to Declare, Julian Barnes expands on the story: during a later race Brambilla is asked by André Brulé why he did it. "The bike had wooden rims, and I wanted to grow poplars in my garden," jokes Brambilla. "Just as well you didn't plant your water bottle as well," says Brulé, "or you would have grown a pharmacy." This you remember.

And so yes, drugs. He doesn't shy away from the issue, but in some ways they've become a bigger story than the racing over recent decades, and... well, a book like this isn't going to reflect that exactly, I suppose, it's a light-hearted romp, and he does tell us about cyclists having to exercise through the night so their EPO-stuffed blood doesn't clog their arteries, and he doesn't pretend that the pre-modern era was a wonderland of muesli-eating Corinthians, but he might've given a bit more space to Marco Pantani and... I don't know, I just want a different book, I guess, one that can address questions about what ought to constitute illegal performance enhancement anyway, one that tackles matters of morality and motivation, rather than this one, which is more wasn't Tom Simpson a lovely guy and hahaha Chris Boardman crashed into a wall and did I tell you about the time Eugène Christophe had to repair his own front forks in a smithy?

So, you know, it's a trashy stocking-filler sort of thing for dipping into (I, as a rebel, read through it in two sittings), and it's entertaining enough, so, okay, I'm being ridiculous, and, I dunno, two and a half stars or something, yeah? ( )