John Major, More than a Game: the story of cricket’s early years, Harper, 2007, pp. 433. I overheard a remark on Radio 4 recently to the effect that Wagner was like Marmite and cricket: you either “got it” or you didn’t. The implication for those administering or producing these goods was that they really didn’t […]

George K. Behlmer, Risky Shores: savagery and colonialism in the Western Pacific, Stanford University Press, 2018, pp. xiv + 338. In the common rooms and waiting rooms of my youth Punch was ubiquitous. One rarely read the articles, but always looked at the cartoons; a distinct genre of these showed missionaries in cooking pots. The […]

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 of […]

David Papineau, Knowing the Score, How Sport teaches us about Philosophy (and Philosophy about Sport), Constable, 2017, pp. 328 The sub-title to David Papineau’s book suggests a pair of objectives. They are, of course, open to interpretation. For example, it is eminently clear that the author is not concerning himself with the question of what […]

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 “other” […]

David Wootton, Power, Pleasure and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018, pp. 386. This is a book on the (very large) subject of “the Enlightenment” and its moral consequences. That it is a traditional scholarly work can be judged by the fact that of its 386 […]

Frances Welch, Imperial Tea Party, family, politics and betrayal: the ill-fated British and Russian royal alliance, Short Books, 2018, pp. 282. Although rather amateurishly presented in several respects this is a fascinating and well-researched slice of history. It covers the three meetings of the British royal family with their Romanov cousins in the years before […]

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 is […]

Lincoln Allison, emeritus reader in politics, University of Warwick, is reading Mikiso Hane’s Japan, A Short History (Oneworld, 2017 printing). When in Tokyo . . . I am one of many who must read the history of the country they are in and Hane’s version is the leading contender for Japan. He was a Californian […]