I spent the first four months of 2026 writing a book about things I liked. But on May 12th I had a “knee replacement”; even if it goes well you are in a lot of pain for quite a long time and deeply frustrated. So here I am, approaching my eightieth birthday and feeling like […]

I am going to write about Steve Lamb the cricketer and I apologise to anyone reading or listening to this who doesn’t understand cricket or finds it boring, but Steve the cricketer was in many ways the key to Steve the person. I played cricket for more than forty years with Steve. He was an […]

I am ten years old and I know the difference between the literal and the metaphorical. But the woman I’m looking at does not. Metaphorically, she has blood on her hands, but she thinks it is literal. She’s screaming at her hands. She’s gone bonkers: I can see them clearly and they are completely clean. […]

Monday February 12th 2024 7.30am: Get up. Notice that the sky is cloudless, retrieve milk and newspaper from the doorstep and make tea. Banana for breakfast. 10am: After exercising cycle to the tennis club for a singles match. This is played in our own ladder format, 13 games completed whatever the score. A brilliant way […]

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds, November. Thomas Hood, 1844 and it surely fits the reflex image aroused by the name of the month. And in 2022 we could repeat the words of a century earlier with which Captain Boyle concludes Sean O’Casey’s Juno and […]

Here’s a really good trick: you charge hundreds of middle class people a three-figure sum each to sit in a place called a theatre. There you put in front of them the kind of tattooed, drug-dealing thief and marginal pedophile whom, if he appeared in the field at the back of their house, would have […]

(Please note that at the time of posting – March 2018 – this is the only item on this site not by me. It is by my son Mike and was delivered at a large fundraising dinner in Birmingham on October 28th 2017. The total amount raised was in excess of £140,000, the previous best […]

Lincoln Allison, emeritus reader in politics, University of Warwick, is reading Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind (Granta, 2003)   Mountains were: forbidden and forbidding, an odious nuisance, God-forsaken and ugly, an “other” to be avoided. Mountains are: sublime and beautiful, a challenge and a sustenance for the human spirit, God’s finest creation and an […]

Lincoln Allison, emeritus reader in politics, University of Warwick, is reading James Hawes’ The Shortest History of Germany (Old Street Publishing, 2017)   I was given this book in a pub by a friend who had just finished it: brushing up on German history with a quick summary seemed an excellent idea. Except that it […]

Rayvon Fouché, Game Changer: the techno-scientific revolution in sports, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2017, pp. 262   A starting claim of Game Changer is that the impact of technology on sport in the last thirty years is on a different scale from anything previously. A great deal of the book covers the familiar issues […]