Whichever sport you follow, it is only through books about the games, the players, the events and the participants that you will gain a real insight into the motivating factors behind people with unimaginable (and sometimes inexplicable) talent. Fixtures and results bombard you from every conceivable media channel – TV, radio, the internet, mobile phones. But the real insights into the characters of the people, and the inside stories of the dressing rooms - from the muddy fields of winter to the steely mechanics and oily rags in the pit-lane - only really come from reading about them in books (sometimes long after the event is over or the personality has died).