THIS SPORTING LIFE SPORT AND LIBERTY IN ENGLAND, 1760-1960

ROBERT COLLS Oxford University Press, 416pp, £25, ebook £25

‘The English foxhunter riding wild over other people’s lands circa 1800, and the English football hooligan running wild over other people’s lands much later, were related figures. For both, writes Robert Colls, sport was “an expression of liberty and belonging”. In fact, sport was central to Englishness.’ This was the summary of the book’s argument provided by Simon Kuper in his review for the FT. ‘ This Sporting Life displays exhausting quantities of erudition, sometimes within a single sentence,’ Kuper observed. ‘The prose is lively even in the footnotes, though the occasional passage of Joycean free association can be confusing. Still, there are jewels on every page, such as the footballer Nat Lofthouse rising at 3.30am on Saturdays in 1943 to work a full shift in the coal mine, before playing for Bolton Wanderers in the afternoon.’ Jonathan Liew, in the New

Statesman, found the book to be ‘beautifully and inventively expressed, witty and bawdy in places’, but ‘for all the big ideas and grand unifying theories, perhaps the most impressive element of This Sporting Life is its light touch, the way it never quite loses sight of the fact that at its heart, sport is fun’. In the Sunday Times, Dominic Sandbrook was another enthusiast for Colls’s vision of sport as central to English life. ‘Eccentric, dazzlingly learned and often very funny’, his book ‘takes in skipping and marbles, foxhunting and cockfighting, poachers and gamekeepers, bloodsoaked prizefighters and cricketcrazed public schoolboys’.