What Monsieur X treated me to was a philosophical and metaphysical discourse, a great deal of which I did not understand and have regrettably forgotten. He was telling me that he was a retired naval officer; and then he was telling me that he was now “a professional fortune-teller. A series of spectacular coups netted him (and his friends, with whom he generously shared his predictions) the equivalent of millions of pounds, and soon saw him nicknamed Monsieur X and hailed as a hero by a public desperate to see someone get one over on the state. Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, Des Moutis made a daring attempt to beat the French state-run betting system.

If Deep Throat was a cheat code to the quest for truth, X is a [ sic] walkthrough written by somebody who doesn't want to share his secrets, doesn't like you, and might not even be playing the same game.On the other hand, to work out combinations, the formula is the same except that you have to multiply the denominator by 3! Entertainment Weekly included the character in the list of the top 20 Black Sci-Fi Icons in 2009, at number 17.

The Sorbonne was only a few minutes’ walk away, so were the Luxembourg Gardens and the Odéon, and so in the other direction were the quays with their bookstalls, the river itself, and the Théâtre Français; while only a little further off than these were the cafés of Montparnasse, which seemed at that time to be the centre of the artistic and intellectual world.A journalist and lifelong betting and racing enthusiast, Jamie Reid is the author of two novels and five non-fiction books including Doped, winner of the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, Blown, Days Like These: The Education of a Racing Lover and A Licence To Print Money, shortlisted for the 1992 William Hill Sports Book of the Year.