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Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape
Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape
Apr 26, 2025 10:40 AM

Author:Paul Howard

Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape

Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape is the astonishing biography of French cycling star Jacques Anquetil. For the first time since his death in 1987, it reveals the extraordinary truth behind the legend, the man and the cyclist.

His list of 'firsts' alone makes him worthy of a place in the cycling pantheon: the first man to win the Tour de France five times; the first man to win all three grand tours - the Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España; and the first man to win both the Tour and Vuelta in the same year.

However, the extraordinary life of Anquetil does not stop at his achievements on a bike. He candidly admitted to using drugs, offended legions of fans by confessing that his only motivation for riding was financial and infamously indulged his enthusiasm for the high life. He also seduced and married his doctor's wife, had a child with her daughter and then sustained a ménage à trois with both wife and stepdaughter under the same roof for 12 years. When this 'family' eventually imploded, he attempted to inspire jealousy in his former lovers by having a child with his stepson's ex-wife.

Containing exclusive contributions from Anquetil's family, friends, teammates and rivals, Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape untangles myth from reality and confirms that fact is definitely stranger than fiction.

Reviews

An extraordinary biography

—— The Times Magazine

Paul Howard has not allowed Anquetil's astonishing love life to overwhelm his equally extraordinary career . . . an impeccably researched book (Book of the Week)

—— Independent on Sunday

An excellent work

—— Daily Telegraph

A stunning story

—— Shortlist

One Man’s Everest is told with great honesty. It is a tale of immense enthusiasm and remarkable determination. The writing makes you feel as if you are eating your way through a stick of Blackpool rock – every page has Kenton Cool written right through it.

—— Climber Magazine

Kenton Cool, king of Everest

—— The Telegraph

This exceptional title is a must for anyone (which includes me) who doesn’t quite understand the psychology of a professional cyclist.

—— Graham Watson , Cycle Sport

A fascinating insight into the life of a seasoned pro cyclist… I doubt that many riders could make such a story as readable and informative as Millar.

—— Road.cc

A superb, intensely poetic collection of essays.

—— Sunday Times

Wroe has become a daredevil writer… Light of myriad types may blaze in the mind’s eye of the reader…elegantly produced, lightly illustrated volume… Wroe’s style here is rhapsodic and meditative.

—— Stoddard Martin , Literary Review

A passionate and meandering love letter to a natural phenomenonSix Facets of Light reads as if you are in Wroe's mind, listening to her mosey from her own astute observations to celebrations of light by famous names. The pace of the narrative is just like going on a long, rambling walk on the South Downs Way in summer, making it a book best enjoyed at your leisure in the great outdoors.

—— Mary Ann Pickford , Irish News

[A] remarkable new book… Felicities of phrasing and cadence on every page…each of the six chapters offers something of the taut coherence and closeness of the structure of musical variation.

—— Peter Davidson , Tablet

[A] remarkable new book… A love song to light… Ann Wroe is perfectly equipped to deal with this rich mix.

—— Piers Plowright , Camden Review

A unique voice in nonfictionSix Facets of Light exists in a world of quivering immanence.

—— Kathryn Hughes , Guardian

She switches from thoughts about an English lane to Coleridge, Thoreau, Samuel Palmer, larks, ragwort and Ravilious’s taste in poetry, in effortless and beguiling succession.

—— Royal Academy

A wide-ranging and imaginative work of non-fiction… Never less than engaging.

—— Erica Wagner , New Statesman

Six Facets of Light is dazzlingly original.

—— Lucy Hughes-Hallett , Guardian

Six Facets of Light is a book that is making me look and think more closely, and closer again. In its own way this feels like a hymn of praise, a thanksgiving and a celebration of something replete with mystery… Slowly the shackles of modern scientific thought and progress and theory slip away and I find myself observing light as if I have only just realised it existed. How clever a book has to be to achieve that.

—— Dove Grey Reader

A genre-crossing consideration of what light has meant to writers, painters and lovers of landscape.

—— Oldie

Inspiring, beautifully written.

—— Sunday Times

An exquisitely written study of light in the works of various poets and painters.

—— Daily Telegraph

A wonderful literary meditation… This book is suffused with vivid personal memory and precise, delicate observation of Nature. Wroe’s feeling for landscape is both sensitive and acute; her style is lyrical and precise.

—— Hugo Davenport , Resurgence and Ecologist

A book for winter.

—— Honor Clerk , Spectator, Books of the Year

People of faith talk a great deal about light, and we would do well to learn more about it from Wroe’s quick-eyed love of it.

—— Mark Oakley , Church Times

Wroe passes her elusive subject, light itself, through the prism of her dazzlingly well-read mind, and the resulting rainbows fairly dance across the page… An utterly original book that will leave you, in every sense of the word, enlightened.

—— Claire Lowdon , Sunday Times, Book of the Year

Ann Wroe’s Six Facets of Light is a fascinating and original meditation [on light]. Six Facets of Light is an exquisite collage of relations, a prose poem to “what escaped” absolutely everyone – and to how madly, brilliantly, they tried to “be in step”.

—— Joanna Kavenna , Times Literary Supplement
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