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

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Circumspect, slyly reticent, and oleaginously smooth' From the Archive: John Banville reviews Andrew Motion's mys… ,
    • With our February issue about to go to press, enjoy a slice of LR history - Hilary Mantel on Joan Haslip's biograph… ,
    • What did London look like in the 6th Century? Rory Naismith's 'Citadel of the Saxons' tries to answer that questi… ,
    • Start your week with a dose of Russian Revolutionary zeal. Donald Rayfield reviews Tobie Mathew's 'Greetings From t… ,
    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    Follow Us