Football fan violence was far from an invention of the 1980s... It’s one of the most extraordinary and tantalizing facts of our time. Take out all the estimated-to-be-drug-related activity out of the crime figures, and what you are left with are the gentle, pacific, Marpleian levels of fair-cop crime enjoyed in ... Read More...
About Author Profile: James Hamilton
You may have thought The Damned United had said everything worth saying about Leeds, but a new book looks at the relationship between England's most controversial club and its city's Jewish community... United's peaks and troughs over the past fifty years have coincided with the peaks and troughs, not only of ... Read More...
In a post of extraordinary sweep and scope, James Hamilton looks at how the World Wars robbed Britain of its sense of future, symbolised by the eternally backward-facing game of football... My last post about the relationship between the Great War and football generated a debate about the extent to which causualties robbed ... Read More...
At The Dabbler we're going to be reviewing more of the best new books, both recent publications and imminent ones. Here James Hamilton reviews the Philip Larkin-haunted story of "a man from England's decaying margins"... I think we 40-to-60-somethings are unforgetting this now, the way we grew up with the threat ... Read More...
Sports historian James Hamilton marvels at the pioneering works of film, sound and photography which, once lost, are now freely available again on the internet, and he ponders their profound impact on our sense of history... One of the joys of sports history is that you get to involve yourself in the work of media pioneers: ... Read More...
James Hamilton celebrates the old English football stadia, remarkable but unappreciated national treasures, through the story of gem-in-the-rough Burnden Park. They were built in a 30 year goldrush, the old English football stadia, and when they were new, there'd been nothing like them in the world since Byzantium. Fifty years after ... Read More...
James Hamilton, the Dabbler's great sport-theory iconoclast and destroyer of accepted wisdoms, looks at some footballing 'Golden Ages'... I've been following football for thirty years - since the days of Ron Greenwood's England - and one minor consequence of that is that a younger generation now accuse me of having lived through ... Read More...
James Hamilton examines the phenomenon of nostalgia... I've never had it: the lightly held, easily tossed-off belief that the past was "simpler" or "more innocent." And little wonder. I spent most of my childhood obscurely but thoroughly scared; even now, many years later, I find myself disassociating under stress or seeking ... Read More...
Gary Neville's first England cap coincided with John Major's "put up or shut up" Rose Garden challenge to his party critics early in the blistering summer of '95. I was a young man myself then, flatsharing in central London with friends. It was the fiftieth anniversary of VE-Day, the economy ... Read More...
James Hamilton examines the oft-repeated comparison between football fandom and religion... England's football stadia were the last major addition to our great Victorian cities in their original form: it follows from that that, like so much about our great Victorian cities, by the 1970s they were clapped out and unfit for ... Read More...
