Another Fine Mess

An easy and enjoyable read, it’s as much about the roadtrip in a vintage car as it is observations on the current political climate in America

Moore… [is] very good at soaking up the strangeness of America and relating it to readers with an easy-going observational humour that only threatens to desert him when he contemplates the excesses of the current administration

Hilarious and scary often in equal measure

This is The Wizard of Oz in reverse – an attempt to uncover the source of what went wrong in America… What lingers is the stories of communities brimming with people who worked like dogs to learn a trade in a country they believed would reward them

Alarmingly full of incident, very funny – even mildly transformative

In the vein of Bill Bryson, this funny travelogue is as much a history of Henry Ford as a commentary on modern America

Entertaining: coming yet also rather thought-provoking

Another Fine Mess is an early contender for the best road-trip book of the year – if not travel book… an absorbing, funny and heartwarming tale

Moore has written some very funny books… Another Fine Mess is his most sombre. The jokes are still plentiful but he also write affectingly about a part of post-industrial America in its death throes

Tim Moore’s writing has appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Sunday Times and Esquire. He is the author of Gironimo!, French Revolutions, Do Not Pass Go, Spanish Steps, Nul Points, I Believe In Yesterday and You Are Awful (But I Like You). He lives in London.

Tim Moore - indefatigable travelling everyman – switches two wheels for four as he journeys across Trumpland in an original Model T Ford. 
 
‘Alarmingly full of incident, very funny – even mildly transformative’ Daily Mail 
 
Lacking even the most basic mechanical knowhow, Tim Moore sets out to cross Trumpland USA in an original Model T Ford. Armed only with a fan belt made of cotton, wooden wheels and a trunkload of ‘wise-ass Limey liberal gumption’, his route takes him exclusively through Donald-voting counties, meeting the everyday folks who voted red along the way. 
 
He meets a people defined by extraordinary generosity, willing to shift heaven and earth to keep him on the road. And yet, this is clearly a nation in conflict with itself: citizens ‘tooling up’ in reaction to ever-increasing security fears; a healthcare system creaking to support sugar-loaded soda lovers; a disintegrating rust belt all but forgotten by the warring media and political classes. 
 
With his trademark blend of slapstick humour, affable insight and butt-clenching peril, Tim Moore invites us on an unforgettable road trip through America. Buckle up!

Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail

The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold

From the author of French Revolutions and Gironimo! comes a hideously over-ambitious challenge on doomed machinery. Tim Moore cycles the length of the old Iron Curtain on a shopping bike.

One hundred per cent self-inflicted … Beyond stupid … It's hilarious.

A good, entertaining writer, laugh-out-loud funny in parts.

Moore’s books are strangely inspiring. It’s hard not to be impressed by a man in his early 50s who hasn’t really ridden for two years…deciding to undertake a huge ride on a completely inappropriate bicycle. It makes the daily struggle to get motivated for ride to work seem a little weak, and whets your own appetite for a bike-based adventure. It probably won’t be quite as amusing without Tim Moore for company though.

An epic trip… Underpinned by Moore’s pinpoint accurate observations and engaging style that has you rooting for him from the moment he pedals forward on his folding bike.

If you enjoyed reading about Moore's travels in France and Italy, chances are you'll love this too.

An epic, hugely amusing journey… Perfect Christmas fare.

Moore lurches from crisis to crisis in a hilarious 9,000km, 20 country, ride along the old Iron Curtain from the Norwegian-Russian border to the Bulgarian Black Sea with quasi-frostbite and a few rusted watchtowers thrown in

Calling it a 'proven formula' is not to take anything away from Moore's achievements, both in completing an incredible cycling journey, and then writing another entertaining book about it: to have done both three times is impressive. To keep to the successful formula, Moore first needs another ridiculous challenge as the theme of his journey: check. Then he must use wholly inappropriate equipment: check. Try to avoid any fitness training before the journey: check. Make sure that there are numerous challenges and obstacles to overcome along the way to provide amusing anecdotes: check. Finally, make sure that you can write in an engaging and humorous style: check… Tim Moore does it again, enhancing his reputation as one of the best exponents of the cycling travelogue

Tim Moore is a serial cyclist who loves to do things the hard way… His blackly comic account of his adventures will convince you that extreme cycling is best appreciated in anecdotal form

Filled with laugh-out-loud scenes and witty comments, alongside serious reflections on the consequences of the Communist dream and reminders of how disparate Europe still remains, this book was difficult to put down

He is quite, quite bonkers - and very funny

'Bill Bryson on two wheels' Independent 
 
Scaling a new peak of rash over-ambition, Tim Moore tackles the 9,000km route of the old Iron Curtain on a tiny-wheeled, two-geared East German shopping bike. 
 
Asking for trouble and getting it, he sets off at the Arctic winter's brutal height, bullying his plucky MIFA 900 through the endless and massively sub-zero desolation of snowbound Finland. 
 
Haunted throughout the journey by the border detritus of watchtowers and rusted razor wire, Moore reflects on the curdling of the Communist dream, and the memories of a Cold War generation reared on the fear of apocalypse - at a time of ratcheting East-West tension. 
 
After three months, 20 countries and a 58-degree jaunt up the centigrade scale, man and bike finally wobble up to a Black Sea beach in Bulgaria, older and wiser, but mainly older.

Riding the Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy

Gironimo!

The author of the bestselling French Revolutions does Italy - cycling the course of the 1914 Giro d'Italia on a wooden bike. 
 
'Bill Bryson on two wheels' Independent

A wonderfully written, extremely funny book... You read Gironimo! with a permanent smile on your face

Readers of Moore’s French Revolutions will not be disappointed by this hilariously painful, and poignant, adventure

Gironimo! is partly a story of adversity, despair, and tenacity – and partly a funny, and often sweary, travelogue. I was hooked from the start

Absurd, inspirational and laugh-out-loud funny, Gironimo! Is a charming tribute to the dogged resilience of the amateur spirit and a golden age of road cycling

Part travelogue, part sports record and part history and all written with his inimitable humour

Gironimo is the perfect successor to French Revolutions, and provides more of everything that made the latter so popular

The author’s adventures are often highly entertaining, though, as “road-trip” literature, it is unusual in that it mostly makes the reader glad not to be on the road!

Having ridden the route of the Tour de France in French Revolutions, led a donkey on a 500-mile pilgrimage in Spanish Steps and driven round the worst places in Britain in an Austin Maestro for You Are Awful (But I Like You), Tim Moore can loook back on a towering career in misadventure. 
 
Gironimo!, his latest and most imposing pedal-powered endeavour, is a story of predictable over-ambition trumped by frankly staggering over-achievement. Moore lives in London with his wife and three children, and still wears those welding goggles at Christmas.

A 3,162 km race. A 48-year-old man. A 100-year-old bike. Made mostly of wood. That he built himself. 
 
Tim Moore sets off to recreate the most appalling bike race of all time. The notorious 1914 Giro d'Italia was an ordeal of 400-kilometre stages, cataclysmic night storms and relentless sabotage - all on a diet of raw eggs and red wine. Of the 81 who rolled out of Milan, only eight made it back. 
 
Committed to total authenticity, Tim acquires the ruined husk of a gearless, wooden-wheeled 1914 road bike with wine corks for brakes, some maps and an alarming period outfit topped off with a pair of blue-lensed welding goggles. 
 
From the Alps to the Adriatic the pair relive the bike race in all its misery and glory, on an adventure that is by turns bold, beautiful and recklessly incompetent.

Travels Through Unloved Britain

You Are Awful (But I Like You)

A nostalgic and very funny celebration of the slightly slapdash place we call home: Great Britain

There aren’t many travel writers funnier than Tim Moore

A fine piece of comic writing...by the end of the book he is, unlike his Maestro, firing on all cylinders

A pilgrimage to the most derelict, unlovable and forlorn parts of Britain

There's a true affection in the descriptions of bypasses, roundabouts and rainy caravan parks

Moore is...a likeable guide and a witty turner of phrases, and his plunges into local history as he tootles around in his decrepit Austin Maestro demonstrate a gift for bathos and an eye for the poetry of dereliction

Moore has a nice line in description...and is able to describe the many absurdities encountered on his travels with admirable detachment

Hilarious... This book will have you in stitches... What emerges is a nostalgic celebration of just how mad Britain can be (5 stars)

Tim Moore's wry portraits of unfashionable British towns nicely combine knockabout humour, witty one-liners and an undertow of sadness

A brilliant book to dip in and out of. For those that love the works of rambling travel authors such as Bill Bryson this book will be a perfect addition to their collection

Would you cheer if they sent you to Coventry? 
 
Could you stick up for Stoke or big-up Bracknell? 
 
Can you handle the thrill of Rhyl, the heaven of Hull or the mirth of Tydfil? 
 
In You are Awful, Tim Moore drives his Austin Maestro round all the places on our beloved island that nobody wants to go to – our most miserable towns, shonkiest hotels, scariest pubs, and silliest sea zoos... 
 
But as the soggy, decrepit quest unfolds he finds himself oddly smitten, and the result is a rousing, nostalgic celebration of mad, bad But I Like You Britain.

Cycling the Tour de France

French Revolutions

Tim Moore, the ultimate amateur, attempts to complete all 3,630km of the Tour de France in the weeks before the professionals set off.

One of the funniest books about sport ever written

Bill Bryson on two wheels... A one-liner every other line...not so much witty travelogue as self-examination in a joke-heavy trial by fire

Moore is a talented and funny writer who, through a combination of slapstick, absurd simile and a healthy suspicion of French civilisation, gives us something to laugh at on almost every page

Moore unleashes a high-energy torrent of astute observation and hilarious self-deprecation. Hailed as the new Bill Bryson, he is in fact a writer of considerably more substance... The jokes come thick and fast

Hilarious and inspiring... It is embarrassingly laugh-out-loud

I’ve got a degree in English, I’ve read all the books of Evelyn Waugh and just about every comic novelist, and its still the funniest book I’ve ever read … I caused a commotion on a train, I was laughing that hard.

Think of it as Bill Byron, minus quite a few pounds, on a bike

Tim Moore's books inlcude Do Not Pass Go, Spanish Steps, Nul Points, I Believe in Yesterday and You Are Awful (But I Like You). He lives in London.

‘Bill Bryson on two wheels’ Independent 
 
Self-confessed loafer Tim Moore, seduced by the speed and glamour of the biggest annual sporting event in the world, sets out to cycle the Tour de France. All 3,630km of it. 
 
A few weeks before the actual Tour de France, British writer Tim Moore sets out to cycle the course and offers a laugh-out-loud funny and highly entertaining account of how the great ride would feel when embarked on by an amateur. Racing old men on butchers' bikes and being chased by cows, Moore soon resorts to standard race tactics - cheating and drugs - in a hilarious and moving tale of true adventure.

Nul Points

A hilariously funny book about the Eurovision Song Contest.

The world's funniest travel writer turns his pen to the Eurovision Song Contest

We love travel humourist Tim Moore's take on the Eurovision ultra-losers

It makes for a diverting trip and Moore's glib, easily digested comic style is well suited to these tales of defiance and depression and pride curdled with paranoia

Moore is a talented and very funny writer

Funny and unhinged- there is something beautifully true to the Eurovision spirit about Nul Points

He can't help writing amusingly: it's in his DNA... a sometimes blisteringly funny account of surprisingly sad lives

It's inevitably Tim Moore's pseudo-forensic take on the whole madness which makes it so much fun

There is something engaging and even informative in the book's portrait of the less glamorous side of Europe's pop musical industries

Hums and strums along genially, with a generous and unkitsch affection

Tim Moore's books include French Revolutions, Do Not Pass Go, Spanish Steps and I Believe in Yesterday. He lives in London.

The spangled insanity, the stubborn reinforcement of crude national stereotypes, the scoreboard shamelessly corrupted by cross-border friendship and hatred... throughout those long post-ABBA decades, the Eurovision Song Contest has been drawing 450 million of us to the sofa for all the wrong reasons. And the most gloriously wrong of all: our enduring fascination with the unfortunates left to wander the desolate summit of Mount Fiasco without a point to their names. 
 
From Lisbon to Liverpool, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Tim Moore travels the continent to track down the thirteen Eurominstrels who suffered the entertainment world's prime humiliation.

A 2000 year Tour through the Filth and Fury of Living History

I Believe In Yesterday

'Hailed as the new Bill Bryson, he in fact a writer of considerably more substance' - Irish Times

Moore has never been afraid to suffer for his art. In pursuit of comic travelogue gold, he's followed in the footsteps of a nineteenth-century explorer; driven, silver-suited, across Europe in a temperamental Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow; cycled the 3,500km-plus route of the Tour de France; and made a pilgrimage to Santiago accompanied only by a donkey. But none of this compares to what he endured for this superbly funny new book

His funniest book... Possibly the best book ever completed by a man covered in congealed animal fat, sweat and canon smoke

The main lesson of this entertaining trawl through history-as-dressing-up is that living the way we used to is not much better

Hugely enjoyable... Whether he's firing cannons, battling Gauls or forgetting how to get into his codpiece, moore is always entertaining, and this book is laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely educational

The tone is light and Moore a delightful writer

A live and amusing... interesting and entertaining read

Tim Moore's books include French Revolutions, Do Not Pass Go, Spanish Steps and Nul Points and You Are Awful. He lives in London.

In 1989, Tim Moore moved into the last house in Chiswick with an outside toilet. Intrigued by a subsequent encounter with an elderly former resident, he finds himself inspired to travel back to the land before now, experiencing the hardships and pleasures enjoyed and endured by Moores gone by. 
 
The journey that follows takes him through the world of historical re-enactment: living on bramble leaves, Johnny cake and porridge, Moore travels from the Iron Age to the Steam Age, from Roman legionary to Tudor master to Yankee spy, sharing straw beds and daft hats with period obsessives driven by socio-historical curiosity, disillusionment with the modern world, or a simple nostalgia for campfires, flatulence and brutality. 
 
I Believe in Yesterday is an odyssey through 2,000 years of filth and fury, to a time where men were men, the nights were black, the world was your outside toilet and everything tasted faintly of leeks.

My Adventures in Living History

Spanish Steps

Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail. With a donkey.

A very funny writer, oozing with comic ideas

An absolutely cracking idea for a book; it's got history, eccentric characters, personal growth - and plenty of really good jokes

One of the classier writers of the humorous travel book... A very entertaining read

At last, a travel book that makes you think but also makes you laugh out loud

Tim Moore's books include French Revolutions, Do Not Pass Go, Spanish Steps, Nul Points, I Believe in Yesterday and You Are Awful (But I Like You). He lives in London.

Ludicrous, heart-warming and improbably inspirational, Spanish Steps is the story of what happens when a rather silly man tries to walk all the way across a very large country, with a very large animal who doesn't really want to. 
 
Being larger than a cat, the donkey is the kind of animal Tim Moore is slightly scared of. Yet intrigued by epic accounts of a pilgrimage undertaken by one in three medieval Europeans, and committed to historical authenticity, he finds himself leading a Pyrenean ass named Shinto into Spain, headed for Santiago de Compostela. 
 
Over 500 miles of extreme weather and agonising bestial sloth, it becomes memorably apparent that for the multinational band of eccentrics who keep the Santiagan flame alive, the pilgrimage has evolved from a purely devotional undertaking into a mobile therapist's couch. 
 
'Hailed as the new Bill Bryson, he is in fact a writer of considerably more substance and the jokes come thick and fast' Irish Times

Do Not Pass Go

'Moore is a talented and very funny writer' Daily Telegraph

A very funny writer, oozing with comic ideas... There are fantastic jokes here, some lovely observation and a wealth of delicious information

An ideal balance of travel, anecdote and dry wit

A brilliant book that sheds new light on our capital

Tim Moore's books include French Revolutions, Do Not Pass Go, Spanish Steps and Nul Points and I Believe in Yesterday. He lives in London.

A book that tells the story of London since the thirties through the 28 streets, stations and utililties of the Monopoly board. In the wonderful world of Monopoly it still only cost -50 to buy a house in Islington, you can move around London with the shake of a dice and even park your car for free. 
 
In Do Not Pass Go Tim Moore, belying his reputation as a player who always paid that -10 fine rather than take a Chance, fearlessly tackles the real thing and along the way tells the story of a game and the city that frames it. Sampling the rags and the riches he stays in a hotel in Mayfair and one in the Old Kent Road, enjoys quality time with Dr Crippen in Pentonville Prison and even winds up at the wrong end of the Water Works pipe. And, solving all the mysteries you'll have pondered whilst languishing in jail and many other you certainly wouldn't, Tim Moore reveals how Pall Mall got its name, which three addresses you won't find in your A-Z and why the sorry cul-de-sac that is Vine Street has a special place in the heart of Britain's most successful Monopoly champion. 
 
The stirring travelogue of one man's erratic progress around those 28 streets, stations and utilities, Do Not Pass Go is also an epic and lovingly researched history of London's wayward progress in the 66 years since the launch of the world's most popular board game

Tim Moore

Vuelta Skelter is really three books in one. It's the story of Moore's own epic 2,760-mile, lung-busting, thigh-wrenching journey... It is a rich, kaleidoscopic look a the legacy of the Spanish Civil War... And it is also a tribute to Berrendero - a tough, dour loner who refuses to give an inch, either to the mountains or to the authorities... Moore wants to restore JB [Berrendero] to his proper place in the ranks of cycling legends. He succeeds superbly.

Reading Tim Moore is a joy... you will belly laugh at the bedraggled, gazpacho-guzzling figure Moore cuts in Vuelta Skelter... he emerges as a two-wheeled Groucho Marx and a thoughtful Simon Schama combined.

Vuelta Skelter's style is colloquial, full of jokes... the narrative races along like Berrendero on a good day... a valuable portrait of those post-war years of murder and hunger, and the modern Spain that still hardly dares mention them.

Vuelta Skelter...[is] his best cycling book yet. The mixture of the hilarious and the harrowing really shouldn't work but, in the hands of a writer as skilled as Moore, it deftly combines his trademark mischievous wit and a love of cycling.

Riding the Remarkable 1941 Tour of Spain

Tim Moore completes his epic (and ill-advised) trilogy of cycling's Grand Tours. 
 
 Julian Berrendero's victory in the 1941 Vuelta a Espana was an extraordinary exercise in sporting redemption: the Spanish cyclist had just spent 18 months in Franco's concentration camps, punishment for expressing Republican sympathies during the civil war. Seventy nine years later, perennially over-ambitious cyclo-adventurer Tim Moore developed a fascination with Berrendero's story, and having borrowed an old road bike with the great man's name plastered all over it, set off to retrace the 4,409km route of his 1941 triumph - in the midst of a global pandemic. 
 
 What follows is a tale of brutal heat and lonely roads, of glory, humiliation, and then a bit more humiliation. Along the way Tim recounts the civil war's still-vivid tragedies, and finds the gregarious but impressively responsible locals torn between welcoming their nation's only foreign visitor, and bundling him and his filthy bike into a vat of antiviral gel.

Tim Moore

Praise for Vuelta Skelter

Vuelta Skelter is really three books in one. It's the story of Moore's own epic 2,760-mile, lung-busting, thigh-wrenching journey... It is a rich, kaleidoscopic look a the legacy of the Spanish Civil War.. ...

Marvellous

Reading Tim Moore is a joy... you will belly laugh at the bedraggled, gazpacho-guzzling figure Moore cuts in Vuelta Skelter... he emerges as a two-wheeled Groucho Marx and a thoughtful Simon Schama combined.

Vuelta Skelter is really three books in one. It's the story of Moore's own epic 2,760-mile, lung-busting, thigh-wrenching journey... It is a rich, kaleidoscopic look a the legacy of the Spanish Civil War.. ...

Marvellous

Reading Tim Moore is a joy... you will belly laugh at the bedraggled, gazpacho-guzzling figure Moore cuts in Vuelta Skelter... he emerges as a two-wheeled Groucho Marx and a thoughtful Simon Schama combined.

Vuelta Skelter is really three books in one. It's the story of Moore's own epic 2,760-mile, lung-busting, thigh-wrenching journey... It is a rich, kaleidoscopic look a the legacy of the Spanish Civil War.. ...

Marvellous

Reading Tim Moore is a joy... you will belly laugh at the bedraggled, gazpacho-guzzling figure Moore cuts in Vuelta Skelter... he emerges as a two-wheeled Groucho Marx and a thoughtful Simon Schama combined.

Books by Tim Moore

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