Public school education in the second half of the nineteenth century was completely dominated by classics and sport. Rejecting the view that these were competing strands resulting in friction between aesthetic scholars and athletic philistines, this book shows how classicism and athleticism were closely entwined. Using primary sources, such as school magazines and memoirs, it considers how classical ideas shaped the elite British male’s view of his place in the world and his attitudes to m...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Do you freeze up when all eyes are on you?Does your mind go blank the moment you need to speak in a meeting?Do you struggle to get your point across without rambling or losing people's attention?Are you tired of being overlooked because you can't communicate your ideas clearly?Do you avoid speaking up because you're terrified of saying the wrong thing?Does your voice shake or your...

In The English Jeremy Paxman sets out to find about the English. Not the British overall, not the Scots, not the Irish or Welsh, but the English. Why do they seem so unsure of who they are?Jeremy Paxman is to many the embodiment of Englishness yet even he is sometimes forced to ask: who or what exactly are the English? And in setting about addressing this most vexing of questions, Paxman discovers answers to a few others. Like:Why do the English actually e...

'To say "the best cricket book ever written" is piffingly inadequate praise' Guardian'Great claims have been made for [Beyond a Boundary] since its first appearance in 1963: that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privileged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true' Sunday TimesC L R James, one of the foremost thinkers ...

A fascinating cornucopia of facts about Ireland and the Irish, covering its history, culture, land and people.In this enthralling celebration of the places and people that make the country unique, Richard Killeen takes the reader on a tour of Ireland that reveals its rich and surprising history, including its heroes and villains, legends and folklore.As well as exploring the nation's rich literary and sporting heritage, Ireland: 1,001 Things You Need to...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 PINSENT MASONS SPORTS WRITING AWARDA Times Best Sports Book of 2023**'Fascinating' Daily Telegraph'Lively, rich and readable' The Spectator'Thoughtful and entertaining' Guardian'Completely eye-opening - every page contains a gem' Marina Hyde**The remarkable s****tories of how sport shaped the British people.The history of Br...

An Irish TImes Book of the Year'The beauty of this book is in the telling: The Irish Difference lays out its themes and chronologies with impeccable clarity, and is full of fascinating detail... Exemplary.' Irish IndependentFor hundreds of years, the islands and their constituent tribes that make up the British Isles have lived next door to each other in a manner that, over time, suggested some movement towards po...

The acclaimed Sunday Times Sports Book of the YearAmericans may like to think they invented baseball (even if Jane Austen wrote about it decades earlier). And the French might be proud of founding the modern Olympics (when, in fact, a Shropshire doctor beat them to it by forty years).But it was the British that gave sport to the world.From the beginnings of 'the beautiful game' - raucous matches of folk football with hundre...

Why did killing a fox mean liberty? What did parish revels have to do with the Peterloo Massacre? What did animal cruelty have to do with the English constitution? What did the Factory Acts mean for modern football? In This Sporting Life, Robert Colls explains sport as one of England's great civil cultures. The lived experiences of people from all walks of life are reclaimed to tell England's history through its great sporting cultures, from the horseback pursuits of the wealthy a...

This is a new, extended edition of an unusual book, which generated considerable interest and controversy when it was first published in 2004, and won the Ewart Biggs Memorial Prize the following year. In its original form it had three elements, a memoir giving the author's intellectual and political formation and his family connection to 1798 in Wexford, a critique of the bicentenary of the rebellion and of writing about it, and a detailed account of the pivotal battle of New Ross and the...

Stephen. John. Edward II. Richard II. Richard III. These five are widely viewed as the worst of England's medieval kings. Certainly, their reigns were not success stories. Two of these kings lost their thrones, one only avoided doing so by dying, another was killed in battle, and the remaining one had to leave his crown to his opponent. All have been seen as incompetent, their reigns blighted by civil war and conflict. They tore the realm apart, failing in the basic duty of a king to ensur...

A Spectator Best Book of the Year; An Aspects of History Best Book of the Year; An Engelsberg Ideas Best Book of the YearFive hundred years ago, Thomas Wolsey endowed in Oxford a foundation he called Cardinal‘s College. Henry VIII, the monarch who dismissed and ruined him, re-established it as Christ Church later in his reign as an institution rich, spacious and imposing beyond any other. It would help young men of Tudor England and beyond...