MUSTREADS
Out now in paperback
THE CYCLIST WHO WENT OUT IN THE COLD by Tim Moore (Yellow Jersey £8.99) TIM MOORE is a serial cyclist who loves to do things the hard way.
Having conquered — after a fashion — the routes of the Tour de France and the notorious 1914 Giro d’Italia ( the latter in period costume on a woodenwheeled bicycle), he was attracted by the 9,000km Iron Curtain bike trail.
A stickler for authenticity, he made the trip on a customised 1967 East German-made MIFA 900 folding bike, whose shortcomings included an absence of gears and a braking system last used on the penny-farthing.
His wife predicted: ‘You probably won’t die. But I worry you might go mad.’
Happily he did neither, but his blackly comic account of his adventures will convince you that extreme cycling is best appreciated in anecdotal form.
THE WAR ON WOMEN by Sue Lloyd-Roberts (Simon & Schuster £8.99) SUE LLOYD-ROBERTS was a distinguished television foreign correspondent whose friends used to call her the BBC’s ‘Hopeless Cause Correspondent’.
She died in 2015 at the age of 64, having been determined to finish this book.
She didn’t quite succeed, but her daughter, Sarah Morris, provides a loving introduction, describing a childhood full of parties, travel and exotic visitors.
Sue brings together the experiences of women across the globe whose lives she reported on with clarity, indignation and a determination to shine a light on their suffering.
From the Irish women persecuted for being born illegitimate to the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, women whose children were kidnapped during Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, and the victims of forced marriage, sex trafficking and rape, this book gives a voice to countless brave women who refused to accept their fate.
WORTH DYING FOR by Tim Marshall (Elliott & Thompson £9.99) ‘A COUNTRY starts out from a name and a flag,’ said Goethe, the great German writer and statesman. And Tim Marshall’s compendious account of the power of these national symbols explores why and how pieces of decorated cloth became ‘worth dying for’.
Flags are a comparatively recent historical phenomenon. The Romans, Assyrians and ancient Egyptians used standards painted on cloth, but the Chinese discovery of lightweight silk allowed banners to be carried on to battlefields.
Marshall tells the stories behind the world’s bestknown flags and explores the origins of international designs, such as the blackand-white chequered one used at finishing lines, and the blue flag of the UN.