Winter reading

While you don’t have to be a masochist to be a jump jockey it surely helps. You can expect a fall, on average, every 13 rides and it is the only profession in which you are followed round by an ambulance. Self-flagellation, too, seems to be part of the picture.

Former champion jockey Richard Dunwoody detailed in a brutally honest biography how impossible he became to live with thanks to his obsession with winning. Now we have Timmy Murphy’s Riding the Storm (with Donn McClean, Highdown, £18.99), a cathartic confessional of the alcoholism that put the jockey in Wormwood Scrubs after he became hopelessly drunk on a flight back from Japan, assaulting a stewardess and urinating on the fuselage.

Murphy, a painstaking artist in the saddle, chronicles, too, his sackings by Dermot Weld, Declan Gillespie and Kim Bailey, dismissals which resulted from his drinking, poor timekeeping, cockiness and a temper sometimes then taken out on his mounts.