Book review (a curate’s egg)
I bought Robert Colls’ new book This Sporting Life: Sport & Liberty in England, 1760-1960 about three months ago after both reading a review of it in one of the Sunday newspapers and having it recommended to me by a pal because of my general interest in boxing and its forebear – bare-knuckle prize-fighting – as practiced in 18th and 19th Century Britain.
It was originally slated to arrive in less than three weeks but its launch was then postponed and it eventually arrived courtesy of Amazon at the end of September.
I’m all too aware of the concept of “damning with faint praise” but in reviewing it for The Rust that is what I feel obliged to do.
Colls, currently Professor of Cultural History, De Montfort University – a gent of about my own age – is an academic and a man with a prodigious work ethic as are so many of his ilk. Having chosen his field of study – and his topic for this volume – he has applied himself to the task with an admirable, not to say all-consuming, zeal.
The problem facing the average reader of the resulting tome sitting on the upper deck of the proverbial Clapham omnibus is that the extent of the detail presented on every non-work activity coming under the general heading of “sport” that has at one time or another over the past three hundred years held the attention( if not devotion) of the British people is so vast that often it tends to pall – unless, perhaps, that is, it also happens to be a special interest of the reader himself.
I don’t doubt that Mr Colls has done justice to his subject but – in my case, as a boxing man – whilst I found the long passage on pugilism built largely around his report upon the legendary fight between the Englishman Tom Sayers and the American John C. Heenan that took place in Farnborough, Hampshire on 17th April 1860 – sometimes referred to as the first-ever genuine world title fight – absolutely absorbing, I’m afraid that the bulk of the book rather passed me by.
Or perhaps I should regret to report, I rather passed it by.
I’m not much interested in bull-baiting, or bull-running, or even the history of the hounds and hunting world of the shires and countryside, then or now. Or of much of any of the other stuff herein featured, save perhaps for cricket.
I might have read the book from cover to cover if, for example, I had been studying as part of my efforts towards an ‘A’ level or degree.
But as a relaxing ‘hobby read’ to return to now and again, e.g. when other things are done and my time becomes my own, it proved too varied, too detailed and – in many respects – just too obscure and of little interest to your reviewer.
To be fair, in parts it was a brilliant and thorough fly-past some of the fascinating aspects of British sporting history – some of Mr Colls’ incisive analysis and conclusions upon the world of football in the second half of the 20th Century were well worth the airing – but the overall effect of the whole was somewhat disappointing.
My copy of this book now resides where I suspect it is destined to stay for many years – on the right hand side, third shelf down, in the bookcase in my downstairs lavatory. Occasionally – I cannot say when – it might get pulled out for a read of a paragraph or two but I doubt it will ever become dog-eared with over-use.