Tim Moore (born 18 May 1964 in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire) is a British travel writer and humourist. He was educated at Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith. In addition to his travelogues, his writings have appeared in various publications including Esquire, The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Observer and the Evening Standard. He was also briefly a journalist for the Teletext computer games magazine Digitiser, under the pseudonym Mr Hairs, alongside Mr Biffo (a.k.a. comedy and sitcom writer Paul Rose.)
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Books
Moore has published a number of humorous books. The first (1999) was Frost on My Moustache, in which he attempted to trace Lord Dufferin's northerly voyage described in Letters from High Latitudes. Moore's version included a bicycle ride across Iceland; further descriptions of his own bicycle rides have been French Revolutions (2001), Gironimo! (2014), and Vuelta Skelter (2021), related to the Tour de France, Giro d'Italia, and Vuelta a España respectively; and The Cyclist Who Went out in the Cold (2016), from the far north of Europe to the Balkans, along a route close to the Iron Curtain.
Moore's second book, Continental Drifter (2001; in the US, The Grand Tour) traced Thomas Coryate's account (in Coryate's Crudities) of his proto-Grand Tour, but this time doing the journey in a decrepit Rolls-Royce.
Other books have included Do Not Pass Go (2002), based on the British version of the board game Monopoly (and made into an ITV programme in 2004); Spanish Steps (2004; in the US, Travels with My Donkey), on Camino de Santiago; I Believe in Yesterday (2008), on historical reenactment; You Are Awful (but I Like You) (2012), a journey through Britain's lowest-rated towns, hotels, restaurants, etc, in its most-despised car; and Another Fine Mess (2018) from the east coast of the US to the west by Ford Model T.
In 2014, Moore released his ninth book, Gironimo! Riding the Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy, which recounts his 2012 rerunning of the difficult 1914 Giro d'Italia. For this he used a period bicycle and wore a reproduction period costume. The book was Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 in May 2014.
Asked in 2001 for his five favourite books, Moore named Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis), Scoop (Evelyn Waugh), The Portable Dorothy Parker, the film script of Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson), and The Thurber Carnival.
Personal life
Moore lives in Chiswick, West London with his Icelandic partner Birna Helgadóttir and their three children. He is also a brother-in-law of Agnar Helgason and Asgeir Helgason, and son-in-law of Helgi Valdimarsson.