Culture

In 2004, French police officers searching the home of the professional cyclist David Millar found some syringes and empty phials hidden in a hollowed-out book. Millar confessed that he had been using the substance EPO to boost his red-blood-cell count. He was banned from the sport for two years, and returned to cycling a reformed man, becoming a prominent and vocal critic of doping in the professional peloton. The rise and fall and rise of David Millar’s cycling career formed the dramatic backdrop to his first memoir, Riding Through the Dark (2011). His second book, The Racer, is a more elegiac affair. It follows Millar through the twilight of his career, recording his frustration as he loses his position as the elder statesman of British cycling.

‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins/ but not mine’: the opening lines of Patti Smith’s 1975 debut album, Horses, find a young woman marking her territory with fierce conviction. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, she was (or was treated as) an invalid for much of her New Jersey childhood. The restrictions were physical and spiritual. But in her twenties the androgenous daughter of blue-collar workers used her punk poetry to reclaim the freedoms North American culture had stolen from her. And while she relieved Jesus of responsibility for her sins, she certainly didn’t count her compulsion to write and lust and holler among them.

Charles Williams was a bad writer, but a very interesting one. Most famous bad writers have to settle, like Sidney Sheldon, for the millions and the made-for-TV adaptations and the trophy wife. Williams had a following, and in the 1930s and 1940s some highly respected literary figures declared him to be a genius. But why did Williams appeal so strongly to a particular age — and what, if anything, can he offer us now? He belonged to that wonderful generation liberated by the 19th-century spread of education. He came from a family with no resources, but a terrible, pathetic yearning for literature. His father, Walter, managed to scrape into print, writing moralising short stories and sentimental poems for the cheapest magazines.

This is a book written by a most admirable woman, which is nevertheless — with some rare and excellent exceptions — most tiresome to read. Gloria Steinem has done heroic work as a founding force of American feminism and as an organiser, in America, for a myriad of causes. She is an icon of 1960s feminism, when persons such as she explained to women — mostly western women, but you have to start somewhere —that some sort of equality could be fought for and, if won, could change the world for all men and women. She spent some early years after university in India and a Gandhian philosophy permeates her good works.

There’s a curious thing about the bowling green in my Suffolk village. The footpath running alongside it is on a slope, meaning that as you descend, the wall gradually rises and hides the players from view. What’s strange is that the older I get, the more I find myself slowing down to see what happens to the wood that’s just been delivered. Not knowing whether it reached the jack, or managed to nudge the opponent’s wood to one side, simply isn’t an option. It would be like going to see a whodunit and not staying to the end. This book gave me the same feeling. Crown green bowls is one of those things you don’t want any personal contact with; you’re just glad it’s still there. A bit like penicillin, or Ken Dodd.

‘A foggy day in London town,’ croons Fred Astaire in the 1937 musical comedy A Damsel in Distress, puffing nonchalantly on a cigar as he wanders through a wood that has already been half obliterated by belching Hollywood smoke machines. Today Gershwin’s lyrics conjure up a nostalgic vision of life in the city, involving pale fingers of fog wrapping themselves around lamp posts and the muffled clop of hooves on cobbles. Actually, for many years the reality of a London fog was far less appealing. It clogged your lungs and made your eyes smart; it turned the air into a murky kaleidoscope of colours (yellow, grey, blue) that appeared to be on the verge of turning into a solid.