A very honest book - not in a sensational way - but more revealing in the realities of training, competing and racing ... Extremely enjoyable

A good book, well-written, informative, engaging, revealing ... The insights Pinsent brings to his sport are worth the price alone

The most insightful of the post-Olympic books in which the super-human rower demonstrates a reflectiveness that is rare among sportspeople ... He writes superbly

Pinsent tells his own story in A Lifetime in a Race, and tells it truthfully ...This is another tale that rips off the page and says big, powerful things about sport, and about the frailties of big, powerful men

A gripping account of his life and most recent times. He deftly conveys the sheer effort needed to survive the brutal training regimes in top-level rowing, as well as the obsessive intensity that brought him his Olympic haul

I much enjoyed Matthew Pinsent's A Lifetime in a Race, partly because he wrote it himself, partly because he turned out to be such a likeable and interesting guy, and partly because it gently taught me a great deal about rowing

An honest and evocative read which details how winning a gold medal takes much more than "merely" winning a final

Pinsent is a person of many talents. One of them is writing an autobiography

Good looking, rich, a sublimely talented athlete and an excellent writer ... an incredible story adeptly told

It's a good, funny, moving book... [Sullivan] is unfailingly good company, always curious, often very funny

Sullivan knows how to craft a paragraph and tell a story

Reads as what it is: a great first book

This morning Blood Horses showed up in the post. It’s Sullivan’s first book, a memoir about his late sportswriter father as well as a study of equine racing and breeding and obsessing over. We’re only 30 pages in but we’re convinced Sullivan wins it by a length and then some. He’s the best thing to come out of the south since 2 Chainz

A truly fascinating and brilliantly written memoir recounting Sullivan’s relationship with his writer father but also a detailed examination of horse racing, the love of his father’s life, as well as an entire treatise on the relationship between man and horse

Blood Horses blends history, reportage and personal essay. The book is an excellent example of the mixed form that the critic Northrop Frye once called an “anatomy”. [Sullivan’s] enthusiasm rubs off

Brilliant, sometimes maddeningly discursive memoir… Sullivan writes beautifully. Blood Horses makes better reading than the smoothly finished works of less witty and accomplished writers

All the elegance and craft [Sullivan] displayed in [Pulphead] are present once again

Luminous, hard-to-characterise book... By the sheer fizzing excellence of his writing [Sullivan] carries off the difficult task he set himself triumphantly

It’s a daring approach combining memoir and reportage and, beneath it all, the autobiographical theme of his attempt to understand his father, but it works magnificently

The prose is relaxed, the choice of material telling; it is once more a delight to be in his company