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A 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 stories of how sport shaped the British people.
The history of Britain is inseparable from our love affair with sport. Many of our most dramatic social shifts have played out in sporting arenas: cricket and class mobility, rugby and regional rivalry, tennis and gender equality, golf and battles for land, boxing and race-relations. The sporting theatre has even accelerated radical change via heroes including independence fighters, suffragettes and Jewish bare-knuckle boxers crashing the established order. From jousting between kingdoms to the rise of the Commonwealth Games at the end of the imperial era, More Than a Game is the fascinating account of the games, players and audiences that have defined Britain’s past.
‘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 stories of how sport shaped the British people.
The history of Britain is inseparable from our love affair with sport. Many of our most dramatic social shifts have played out in sporting arenas: cricket and class mobility, rugby and regional rivalry, tennis and gender equality, golf and battles for land, boxing and race-relations. The sporting theatre has even accelerated radical change via heroes including independence fighters, suffragettes and Jewish bare-knuckle boxers crashing the established order. From jousting between kingdoms to the rise of the Commonwealth Games at the end of the imperial era, More Than a Game is the fascinating account of the games, players and audiences that have defined Britain’s past.
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Reviews
Horspool writes briskly and clearly . . . if you like to watch sport while thinking politics, this is the book for you
More Than A Game brilliantly and evocatively details the way we shaped this obsession and how it came to shape us and, indeed, our landscape
A superb historical overview of the eternally close and often symbiotic relationship between British sport and British society. Capacious, full of telling detail, unfailingly readable and, perhaps above all, imbued with rock-solid judgment, it deserves to become a classic of sporting literature
A fascinating insight into how sport is both driven by and a driver of societal change
A sparkling history that makes the reader keep murmuring "I never knew that"
An elegant, richly-textured history
Absolutely fascinating and completely eye-opening - every page contains a gem. I loved it
Horspool places sport at the heart of Britain's story . . . A joy . . . More Than a Game observes the grand sweep of British sporting history playing out as a set of eye-opening facts
Thoughtful and entertaining
He has a lovely eye for memorable details . . . The most powerful theme of Horspool's book, though, is his attention to women's sport, so often marginalised in older accounts
Highly original . . . lively, rich and readable . . . the range of Horspool's knowledge is impressive
Fascinating . . . More Than a Game observes the grand sweep of British sporting history playing out as a set of eye-opening facts
Illuminating . . . [Horspool] has a lovely eye for the informative detail
Offers something rich, textured and complex: a thoughtful history of how sport has shaped society and vice versa. You will find delicious nuggets, several "I never knew that" fascinomas, and the overdue correction of long accepted narratives about our sport-obsessed nation
