More Than a Game

ebook / ISBN-13: 9781529363296

Price: £12.99

ON SALE: 9th November 2023

Genre: Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure

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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.

Reviews

Horspool writes briskly and clearly . . . if you like to watch sport while thinking politics, this is the book for you
Literary Review
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
David Kynaston
A fascinating insight into how sport is both driven by and a driver of societal change
Jonathan Wilson, author of INVERTING THE PYRAMID
A sparkling history that makes the reader keep murmuring "I never knew that"
Matthew Engel, author of ELEVEN MINUTES LATE
An elegant, richly-textured history
Michael Taylor, author of THE INTEREST
Absolutely fascinating and completely eye-opening - every page contains a gem. I loved it
Marina Hyde, author of WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!
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
Sunday Telegraph
Thoughtful and entertaining
Guardian
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
The Times, Best Sports Books of the Year
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
Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
Highly original . . . lively, rich and readable . . . the range of Horspool's knowledge is impressive
Leo McKinstry, The Spectator
Fascinating . . . More Than a Game observes the grand sweep of British sporting history playing out as a set of eye-opening facts
Daily Telegraph
Illuminating . . . [Horspool] has a lovely eye for the informative detail
Times Literary Supplement
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
The Critic