Duncan White

Thinking Inside the Box

The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper

By

Orion 368pp £20 order from our bookshop

Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here? The Story of English Football’s Forgotten Tribe

By

Quercus 269pp £17.99 order from our bookshop

I Am the Secret Footballer: Lifting the Lid on the Beautiful Game

By

Guardian Books 230pp £12.99 order from our bookshop

Back in the early 1980s Martin Amis compared harbouring an intellectual interest in football to being a pervert. Reviewing a preposterous anthropological study of the game, he outed himself as one of a rare breed. ‘Pointy-headed football-lovers are a beleaguered crew, despised by pointy-heads and football-lovers alike … Oh, how we have to cringe and hide,’ he wrote, echoing Humbert Humbert. Yes, high-minded football-types enjoyed the social cachet of Lolita’s nympholept. 

Follow Literary Review on Twitter