Shots In The Dark

David Kynaston Bloomsbury €23 ★★★★★

Here’s something I learned from this book: at an Aldershot Town home game during the 2016-17 football season, the match ball sponsor was the Oriental Belly Dance Performers. What a delicious thought that is, a bunch of cavorters putting their name to a nonleague football hackabout. But the oddness of that revelation is appropriate because this diary of a season in the Vanarama National League written by one of Britain’s leading intellectuals is very odd indeed.

David Kynaston, visiting professor at Kingston University, is a renowned social historian. He has written magisterial tomes about the working class, private education, the Bank of England. Now he has turned his sizeable brain towards lowly Aldershot Town, a football operation for whom the term nondescript is barely adequate, but a club with which he has had a life-long obsession.

For Kynaston, football is always on his mind. So he decided to write a diary about a season, to demonstrate the significance it has in his life. What is so unusual about this book is the allusions. Kynaston does not apply standard football-speak. He name-checks T. S. Eliot, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, the more obscure the reference, seemingly the better: ‘Though sadly, like A. J. P. Taylor on the 1848 revolutions, a football season is full of turning-points that fail to turn.’

He is also a self-described member of the metropolitan, liberal elite. And the book is full of his fears about the state of the world. Everything he sees – Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit, Donald Trump – fills him with terror of an approaching authoritarian apocalypse.

But what makes this such a surprisingly engaging read is that despite his pomposity, despite the grandiose loftiness, Kynaston is not without selfdeprecation: ‘ “Bleatings of a liberal wimp” is shaping up to be the subtitle of this diary, but I can’t do anything about it.’ He’s right there.