Duncan White
Thinking Inside the Box
The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper
By Jonathan Wilson
Orion 368pp £20 order from our bookshop
Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here? The Story of English Football’s Forgotten Tribe
By Anthony Clavane
Quercus 269pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
I Am the Secret Footballer: Lifting the Lid on the Beautiful Game
By Anonymous
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.
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