Jeanne Mackenzie Books

The bicycle, says a character in Iris Murdoch’s The Red and the Green, is ‘the most civilized conveyance known to man’, and its devoted riders have left a record of their affections -- and their bumps and bruises -- in the columns of newspapers, diaries, letters, and poems. In Jeanne MacKenzie’s light-hearted selection, we read what Mr. Gladstone said about cycling through an election in Scotland, what Sherlock Holmes discovered from the tracks of a Dunlop tire, why Bernard Shaw ran over Bertrand Russell, how Wells taught Gissing to ride, and the way in which Auden, MacNeice, and Betjeman have rhymed the rolling wheel. Everyone, it seems, has something to say about the bicycle!