The hidden laws of chance that decide who wins in football and how one man learned to exploit them.Football is a game of skill and chance. Skill belongs to the individual, but chance controls the outcome because football, at its core, is a team game.Neil Lanham saw what no one else did. Working as a performance analyst in the English Football League, he uncovered the invisible laws of chance that govern team performance, then built a method...

I Bid You Farewell captures the drama, wit and wisdom of a lifetime in the antiques trade. Set against the backdrop of Suffolk’s market towns and quiet villages, Lanham charts an era of remarkable change in Britain’s auction houses, from the austere post-war years through the booming era of the 1980s.This is the story of a young auctioneer, starting at seventeen in a cattle market, qualifying and then buying a rundown rural auction business. Readers will discover how, from a standin...

Winner of The Times British Sports Book Award 2014.A fascinating insight into the enclosed world of football scouts in the UKA teenaged boy plays football in a suburban park. His name is Raheem Sterling. The call is made: “Get down here quick. This is something special”.Another boy is 8, going on 28. His name is Jack Wilshere. The referee, an Arsenal scout, spirits him away from Luton Town.A young goalkeeper struggles on loan at Cheltenham T...

Football is a game of opinions. Alan Hansen knows this only too well. In his long, distinguished career with Liverpool he faced some fierce public criticism from the media. Now the boot is on the other foot and Hansen himself earns a living as one of football's most outspoken and popular pundits.Hansen's autobiography is as uncompromising as the man himself. Looking back at fourteen victorious years at Anfield, he focuses on the highlights and the inspirational characters - Paisley...

BEN SMITH: PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALLER. Recognise the name? Of course you don't. That's because most of Smith's years in the game were spent outside the vaunted, big-money environs of the Premier League - and this sporting memoir is all the more entertaining as a result. 1995: an adolescent Ben arrives at the training ground of one of England's biggest clubs to begin his journey and realise his dream of playing top-flight professional football. Aged just sixteen, he shares pre-season sessions ...

A unique window on an extraordinary life lived with tremendous zest, discrimination, and intelligenceThe Duchess of Devonshire is the youngest of the Mitford siblings, the famous brood that includes the writers Nancy and Jessica. Like them, she has lived an unusually full and remarkable life, and like them she has an inimitable expressive gift. In Counting My Chickens, she has gathered extracts from her diaries and other writings to create a multifaceted po...

For more than sixteen years Southall kept goal for Everton and Wales, becoming his club and country's greatest servant, as well as Everton's most decorated player. Uncompromising, unorthodox and often unkempt, Southall's career followed an incredible trajectory: from football-mad binman, to the greatest goalkeeper in the world in the space of a few years.

A compilation of the Duchess of Devonshire's anecdotes and observations: "Mitford says she writes 'solely in an effort to amuse,' and amuse she does." — Charleston Post and CourierIn her beguiling memoir, Wait for Me!, Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire (and the youngest of the famously witty brood of writers, agitators, and icons), recounted her eventful life with wit and grace. All in One Basket collects the Duchess of Devonshire's b...

In When I Was a Nipper Alan Titchmarsh goes on a personal and nostalgic journey through post-War Britain in search of treasured values and traditions that were once the soul of society. With characteristic wit, warmth and humour he draws on the experience of his own childhood, and also takes a broader perspective, creating a wonderfully detailed and evocative portrait of a way of life that is fast disappearing, and asks what can we learn from this era of austerity to make our live...

He was one of the hardest, most controversial footballers of his generation: the £20million man who became the first professional player to go to jail for an offence committed on the field of play. He was the fans’ hero who disappeared.Duncan Ferguson was an old-fashioned Scottish centre-forward who went from a boarding house in Dundee to the marble staircase of Rangers in a record-breaking transfer.His £4m move from Dundee United to Ibrox made him British football’s most ex...

'I can never understand how the scribbles of such an ordinary person ... can possibly have value.'So wrote Nella Last in her diary on 2 September 1949. Sixty years on, tens of thousands of people have read and enjoyed the first two volumes of her uniquely detailed and moving diaries, written during World War II and its aftermath as part of the Mass Observation project, and the basis for BAFTA-winning drama Housewife 49 starring Victoria Wood....

The story of one young African boy's journey to UK Premiership soccer stardom.From the Zambian plains to Wembley, this is the story of the boy who was born to be a Bluebird. Earnie follows Robert Earnshaw’s journey from the Zambian village where he was born to Bedwas, where he was spotted playing for the B-team of his local club when he was 12 years old. At 16 he joined Cardiff City on a YTS training scheme to become one of the club’s top scorers. He reflects on his Welsh success a...