Kirjahaku

ââ?¬Ë?One day youââ?¬â?¢ll write a book about this club. Or, more to the point, about me. So you may as well know what Iââ?¬â?¢m thinking and save it up for later when it wonââ?¬â?¢t do any harm to anyone.ââ?¬â?¢

Brings to life a bygone age telling the story of British football from the hardscrabble 1940s and the 'never-had-it-so-good' '50s right through to the dowdy First Division of the '70s and '80s, and slick Premiership.

The two time winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award on George Best, considered the greatest footballer of our time. No other imposed himself so completely on to the romantic imagination.

"Hamilton is a guarantee of quality." --Financial Times "Duncan Hamilton's compelling biography puts flesh on the legend and paints a vivid picture of not only a great athlete, but also a very special human being." --Daily Mail The untold and inspiring story of Eric Liddell, hero of Chariots of Fire, from his Olympic medal to his missionary work in China to his last, brave years in a Japanese work camp during WWII Many people will remember Eric Liddell as the Olympic gold medalist from the Academy Award winning film Chariots of Fire. Famously, Liddell would not run on Sunday because of his strict observance of the Christian sabbath, and so he did not compete in his signature event, the 100 meters, at the 1924 Paris Olympics. He was the greatest sprinter in the world at the time, and his choice not to run was ridiculed by the British Olympic committee, his fellow athletes, and most of the world press. Yet Liddell triumphed in a new event, winning the 400 meters in Paris. Liddell ran--and lived--for the glory of his God. After winning gold, he dedicated himself to missionary work. He travelled to China to work in a local school and as a missionary. He married and had children there. By the time he could see war on the horizon, Liddell put Florence, his pregnant wife, and children on a boat to Canada, while he stayed behind, his conscience compelling him to stay among the Chinese. He and thousands of other westerners were eventually interned at a Japanese work camp. Once imprisoned, Liddell did what he was born to do, practice his faith and his sport. He became the moral center of an unbearable world. He was the hardest worker in the camp, he counseled many of the other prisoners, he gave up his own meager portion of meals many days, and he organized games for the children there. He even raced again. For his ailing, malnourished body, it was all too much. Liddell died of a brain tumor just before the end of the war. His passing was mourned around the world, and his story still inspires. In the spirit of The Boys in the Boat and Unbroken, For the Glory is both a compelling narrative of athletic heroism and a gripping story of faith in the darkest circumstances.

A biography of Garry Sobers, who turns 90 in 2026 and personifies the greatest of West Indian cricket At the end of the 1960s, Garry Sobers became the highest profile beneficiary of English cricket's decision to rid itself of the qualification rule about hiring overseas glamour. He picked Nottinghamshire, a side mediocre for so long that it was stranded on the margins of the Championship. In that first memorable summer Sobers so successfully sparked the revival of a moribund club that it acquired the sobriquet 'Sobers-shire'. Duncan Hamilton fell in love with cricket because he first fell in love with Sobers. He counts himself as 'blessed' to have lived only a shilling bus ride from Trent Bridge during the years Sobers played there. The Man Who Walked Out of the Sun is both Hamilton's remembrance of those times and a study of Sobers' career, tracking the rise and dominance of the world's first 'jet age' cricketer. The barest of Sobers' statistics prove that every superlative ever used about his brilliance is justified, but Hamilton considers them less important than the sense of wonder he inspired, the emotion he stirred, the elan with which he played, the abundant beauty in almost everything he did.

Combining reportage, anecdote, biography, history and personal recollection, A Last English Summer is an honest and passionate reflection on cricket's past, present and future. In 2009 the county system looked directionless and obsolete; more than ever the players blessed with central contracts seemed apart from, rather than a part of, the domestic game; the home Ashes series was for the first time only available on pay-TV; and, of course, the juggernaut of Twenty20 threatened to flatten all but the Test form of the game, suggesting it may soon eclipse even that as well. Duncan Hamilton has preserved this seminal, convulsing season, which in years to come may be seen as a turning point in the history of cricket. In the process he embarks on a journey - often a deeply personal one - through the history and spirit of the game.

An account of the climactic final match of cricket's 2016 County Championship in which Middlesex won the title on the final afternoon by beating second-placed Yorkshire at Lord's.

'Simply magnificent.' Mail on SundayA massive audience in sitting-rooms, parks and pubs watched England in the 2018 World Cup. Yet as Duncan Hamilton demonstrates with style, insight and wit in Going to the Match, watching on TV is no substitute for being there. Hamilton embarks on a richly entertaining, exquisitely crafted journey through football. Glory game or grass roots, England v Slovenia or Guiseley v Hartlepool, he delves beneath the action to illuminate the stories which make the sport endlessly compelling.Along the way he marvels at present-day titans Harry Kane, Mo Salah, Kevin De Bruyne and Paul Pogba, reflects on sepia-tinted magicians Stanley Matthews, Jimmy Greaves, Bobby Charlton and Pele, and assesses managerial giants from Brian Clough and Jose Mourinho to Arsene Wenger and Gareth Southgate.The odyssey takes Hamilton from Fleetwood to Berlin, via Glasgow and a Manchester derby, making detours into art, cinema, literature and politics as he explores the game's ever-changing culture and character.The result, like the L.S. Lowry painting that inspired the book, is a football masterpiece.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE 2019 WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEARDuncan Hamilton is already a multiple award-winning sports writer, but it is hard to imagine he will write a better book than this superb, elegiac portrait of the sociable, feted, but ultimately unknowable, man who virtually invented modern sports writing...This is writing every bit the equal of Cardus himself. - Daily Mail 'Hamilton is a worthy biographer... as much sublime writing comes from his keyboard as from Cardus's pen.' The Times'With its verve, insight and generosity of sympathy, this is by some way the best full-length life of a cricket writer, perhaps even of any sports writer.' Guardian Neville Cardus described how one majestic stroke-maker 'made music' and 'spread beauty' with his bat. Between two world wars, he became the laureate of cricket by doing the same with words.In The Great Romantic, award-winning author Duncan Hamilton demonstrates how Cardus changed sports journalism for ever. While popularising cricket - while appealing, in Cardus' words to people who 'didn't know a leg-break from the pavilion cat at Lord's'- he became a star in his own right with exquisite phrase-making, disdain for statistics and a penchant for literary and musical allusions. Among those who venerated Cardus were PG Wodehouse, John Arlott, Harold Pinter, JB Priestley and Don Bradman. However, behind the rhapsody in blue skies, green grass and colourful characters, this richly evocative biography finds that Cardus' mother was a prostitute, he never knew his father and he received negligible education. Infatuations with younger women ran parallel to a decidedly unromantic marriage. And, astonishingly, the supreme stylist's aversion to factual accuracy led to his reporting on matches he never attended. Yet Cardus also belied his impoverished origins to prosper in a second class-conscious profession, becoming a music critic of international renown. The Great Romantic uncovers the dark enigma within a golden age.

*A MULTIPLE AWARD-WINNING SPORTS WRITER*'Hamilton's book is a marvel . . . I'm not sure he could write a dull sentence if he tried' Spectator One of Duncan Hamilton's favourite writers on cricket, Edmund Blunden, wrote how he felt going to watch a game: 'You arrive early, earlier even than you meant . . . and you feel a little guilty at the thought of the day you propose to give up to sheer luxury'.Following Neville Cardus's assertion that 'there can be no summer in this land without cricket', Hamilton plotted the games he would see in 2019 and write down reflectively on some of the cricket that blessed his own sight. It would be captured in the context of the coming season in case subsequent summers and the imminent arrival of The Hundred made that impossible. He would write in the belief that after this season the game might never be quite the same again.He visits Welbeck Colliery Cricket Club to see Nottinghamshire play Hampshire at the tiny ground of Sookholme, gifted to the club by a local philanthropist who takes money on the gate; his village team at Menston in Yorkshire; the county ground at Hove; watches Ben Stokes's heroics at Headingley, marvels at Jofra Archer's gift of speed in a Second XI fixture for Sussex against Gloucestershire in front of 74 people and three well-behaved dogs; and realises when he reaches the last afternoon of the final county match of the season at Taunton, 'How blessed I am to have been born here. How I never want to live anywhere else. How much I love cricket.'One Long and Beautiful Summer forms a companion volume to Hamilton's 2009 classic, A Last English Summer. It is sports writing at its most accomplished and evocative, confirming his reputation as the finest contemporary chronicler of the game.

'One of the best football books I've ever read.' John Motson on Provided You Don't Kiss Me 'Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed by that attitude. I can assure you it's much more important than that' - Bill ShanklyWhat Shankly said isn't even half-true. In fact, it's bollocks. Football isn't the be-all and end-all of everything. If nothing else, I know that much.As a player, Thom Callaghan was defined by the winning goal he scored in an FA Cup final. The goal wasn't the blessing he imagined it would be. His whole career was defined by that brief moment of glory. With his playing days over, Callaghan, still a local hero, is tempted back to his old club as caretaker manager. His task to rescue it from relegation. He's got the job solely on the recommendation of his former boss and mentor Frank Mallory, now desperately ill and responsible for the team's precipitous decline. Callaghan is pitched into the Premier League during the last months of the 1996-1997 season, where - among reputations more gilded than his own - he finds himself pitted against the likes of Alex Ferguson's Manchester United, chasing their fourth title in five years, and also one of the newest recruits to the English game, Arsene Wenger. Can Callaghan save his club from what seems the inevitability of the drop? Does Mallory - eccentric, inspirational and manipulative - even want him to succeed? What if the prize of a personal triumph isn't worth it in the end?Injury Time is the first novel from the multiple award-winning sportswriter Duncan Hamilton.

'One of the best football books I've ever read.' John Motson on Provided You Don't Kiss Me'Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed by that attitude. I can assure you it's much more important than that' - Bill ShanklyWhat Shankly said isn't even half-true. In fact, it's bollocks. Football isn't the be-all and end-all of everything. If nothing else, I know that much.As a player, Thom Callaghan was defined by the winning goal he scored in an FA Cup final. The goal wasn't the blessing he imagined it would be. His whole career was defined by that brief moment of glory.With his playing days over, Callaghan, still a local hero, is tempted back to his old club as caretaker manager. His task to rescue it from relegation. He's got the job solely on the recommendation of his former boss and mentor Frank Mallory, now desperately ill and responsible for the team's precipitous decline.Callaghan is pitched into the Premier League during the last months of the 1996-1997 season, where - among reputations more gilded than his own - he finds himself pitted against the likes of Alex Ferguson's Manchester United, chasing their fourth title in five years, and also one of the newest recruits to the English game, Arsene Wenger.Can Callaghan save his club from what seems the inevitability of the drop? Does Mallory - eccentric, inspirational and manipulative - even want him to succeed? What if the prize of a personal triumph isn't worth it in the end?Injury Time is the first novel from the multiple award-winning sportswriter Duncan Hamilton.

'Magnificent, moving, often funny and deeply researched account . . . Is this just a book for those who know football? Far from it: this is a story of glory and the impermanence of fame' Sunday Times (Book of the Week)'Like Alf Ramsey's 1966 team, this book has depth, it has riches and it's a winner - the finest piece of sports writing I have read in ages and a superb piece of contemporary history' Peter Hennessy England. 1966. The World Cup.Duncan Hamilton watched England beat West Germany as an eight-year-old boy in the company of his father and grandfather. He recalls 'Wembley, spread out in the sun; the waving flags; the delirious, joy-of-all-joys moment of the final whistle; the trophy sparkling in the late afternoon light'.But, seeing the whole game again during the misery of the first Covid lockdown, finally made him realise what Alf Ramsey and his players had no inkling of, which was what came next for them. How, for many of those boys of summer, almost everything after that shimmering moment amounted to an anti-climax or a setback. How '66 was not a beginning, a guaranteed path towards more success, but a slow decline and fall, and also a disproportionate number of disappointments. And how the triumph of '66 was dulled through constant repetition, the same images always flashed before us.Hamilton recognised, too, how many myths and misconceptions had grown around the match. He decided to revisit '66, tracing the very roots of a story - as well as the hidden figures within it - that really began during the era of post-War austerity.Answered Prayers provides, at last, a full account of English football's greatest achievement and the failures that followed it. We see the institutional inability to appreciate Ramsey and his players, who were taken for granted; the political machinations of the blazered fools who ran the Football Association; the short-sighted blunderers of the Football League.With his matchless insight and descriptive power, Hamilton tells history afresh and shows us, for the first time, the scale of what was won and what was lost.PRAISE FOR DUNCAN HAMILTON'Hamilton has a perceptively humane understanding of men for whom football was never just a game' Guardian'A marriage of prose and detail so fine and fastidious that it takes the breath away' Independent'Justifiably prize-winning' Mail on Sunday

A Financial Times Book of the Year 2023A Daily Express Book of the Year 2023'Magnificent, moving, often funny and deeply researched account . . . Is this just a book for those who know football? Far from it: this is a story of glory and the impermanence of fame' Sunday Times (Book of the Week)'Like Alf Ramsey's 1966 team, this book has depth, it has riches and it's a winner - the finest piece of sports writing I have read in ages and a superb piece of contemporary history' Peter HennessyEngland. 1966. The World Cup.Duncan Hamilton watched England beat West Germany as an eight-year-old boy in the company of his father and grandfather. He recalls 'Wembley, spread out in the sun; the waving flags; the delirious, joy-of-all-joys moment of the final whistle; the trophy sparkling in the late afternoon light'.But, seeing the whole game again during the misery of the first Covid lockdown, finally made him realise what Alf Ramsey and his players had no inkling of, which was what came next for them. How, for many of those boys of summer, almost everything after that shimmering moment amounted to an anti-climax or a setback. How '66 was not a beginning, a guaranteed path towards more success, but a slow decline and fall, and also a disproportionate number of disappointments. And how the triumph of '66 was dulled through constant repetition, the same images always flashed before us.Hamilton recognised, too, how many myths and misconceptions had grown around the match.He decided to revisit '66, tracing the very roots of a story - as well as the hidden figures within it - that really began during the era of post-War austerity.Answered Prayers provides, at last, a full account of English football's greatest achievement and the failures that followed it. We see the institutional inability to appreciate Ramsey and his players, who were taken for granted; the political machinations of the blazered fools who ran the Football Association; the short-sighted blunderers of the Football League.With his matchless insight and descriptive power, Hamilton tells history afresh and shows us, for the first time, the scale of what was won and what was lost.PRAISE FOR DUNCAN HAMILTON'Hamilton has a perceptively humane understanding of men for whom football was never just a game' Guardian'A marriage of prose and detail so fine and fastidious that it takes the breath away' Independent'Justifiably prize-winning' Mail on Sunday

No one has embodied the ideals of the Olympic movement quite like Eric Liddell, star of the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire. After refusing to compete on religious principle in the event in which he was favourite, the 100 metres, at the 1924 Games in Paris, Liddell won an astonishing gold medal in the 400 metres. This book tells his story.

Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, this is the first ever biography of Harold Larwood. Larwood, one of the most talented, accurate and intimidating fast bowlers of all time is mainly remembered for his role in the infamous Bodyline series of 1932-3 which brought Anglo-Australian diplomatic relations to the brink of collapse. Larwood was made the scapegoat - and despite the fact he was simply following his captain's instructions, he never played cricket for England again. Devastated by this betrayal, he eventually emigrated to Australia, where he was accepted by the country that had once despised him. Acclaimed author Duncan Hamilton has gained unprecedented access to the late sportsman's family and archives to tell the story of a true working-class hero and cricketing legend.