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...
Sport
I'll say this for C.S.Lewis: he knew how to coin a memorable book title. The Screwtape Letters. Surprised By Joy. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe... but my personal favourite was Till We Have Faces, the title of a short novel about the battle between sacred love and profane. ... Read More...
What better way to mark Father’s Day tomorrow, than with a celebration of man’s essential style, as observed via the curiously natural habitat of the men’s locker room. Left to their own devices, men seem to survive happily in spartan surroundings, exchanging pleasantries in communal bathing quarters, whilst politely ignoring the ... Read More...
John Arlott called him 'the most variously gifted Englishman of any age,' and Arlott, conjuring his musty magic from an old typewriter set next a glass of something good and red, was probably right. The sheer unlikeliness of CB Fry continues to astonish, more than half a century after his ... Read More...
A couple of years ago, I went to interview Keith Deller, 1983 World darts champion. He took the crown in one of darts’ most famous matches, an upset win over the allegedly unbeatable Crafty Cockney, Eric Bristow. In the pre-Sky, four-channel era, the final went out on one of those ... Read More...
On a wet afternoon in June 1909, Tottenham Hotspur played Everton in front of 8,000 spectators. One of the Spurs players on show was Walter Tull. He was black, and the abuse he'd suffered from hostile audiences had appalled the British press, but today he would score one of his ... Read More...
Jason Webster is the author of five books on Spain, including Duende, which has been translated into a dozen languages. Or the Bull Kills You is the first in a series of detective novels involving Chief Inspector Max Cámara of the Spanish National Police. The second novel, Some Other Body ... Read More...
Bobby Charlton's at the airport, and out in the night somewhere my father's car combs the wet roads. I've slid my body into the back seat footwell and I'm shaking and sobbing with homesickness: at the airport, Bobby Charlton is dressed in a suit and tie and smoking. There's a ... Read More...
This 1950 film from the British Council, entitled simply ‘Cricket’ opens with actor Ralph Richardson announcing: “My name is Richardson and I happen to have been born in Britain” and maintains that level of excellence for the duration. In between bursts of Richardson, we get the unmistakable Hampshire tones – the ... Read More...
In our occasional feature we invite guests to select the six cultural links that might sustain them if, by some mischance, they were forced to spend eternity in a succession of airport departure lounges with only an iPad or similar device for company. Today's voyager is John Halliwell, denizen of Cheshire, ... Read More...
