It's an embarrassing truth for many football fans that it was only when professional football was eventually forced to close down that we recognised Covid-19 as a genuine threat to our way of life. Maybe just as shameful was the fact that once lockdown became normalised, it didn't take long for chatter to start about when the game might begin again. This book begins by charting what happened in the weeks leading up to that point, placing football in the context of furloughs, some new-found...

From Azeem to Ashes charts the last, miserable days of Joe Root's captaincy in early 2022 through to the T20 World Cup victory before the breathless Bazball Ashes finale at the Oval. It's a book written for cricket lovers by a cricket lover, with voices from clubs, the boardroom and the commentary box.September 2020: cricket is in the headlines for the first time since the 2005 Ashes. But the focus is racism, not runs or wickets. Azeem Rafiq's treatment ha...

This is not just a story of a fish—albeit a cannibalistic giant trout of the glacial lochs; it is a tale of compulsion and escape, of the author's rediscovery of a landscape and a clan, and of a willing descent into madness"When I was very young and on holiday in Scotland, my cousin told me about giant trout that lived in small numbers at the bottom of the Highlands' deepest lochs. They were called salmo ferox, and they were rumoured to be uncatchable."...

Zurich, 2 December 2010: FIFA president Sepp Blatter pulls the name Qatar from the envelope to reveal the hosts of the 2022 World Cup. The accusations fly and the recriminations start. But once it's all sunk in, we start to look at maps and temperature charts, and try to scrape together fragments of knowledge about kingdoms in the Arabian desert. The Armchair Guide looks beyond the myths and preconceptions to provide the average fan with sound information about what a World Cup in the dese...

What is it like to follow one of English football's perennial non-achievers? Hugging Strangers is a celebration of what it means to support your club through thick and thin. It speaks to all who love the game but are lumbered - by way of family, geography or plain bad luck - with a team whose glory days are few and far between. At the end of the 1963/64 season Birmingham City stayed in the first division by winning on the last day of the campaign. In the 55 years that followed, the Blues k...

"When I was very young and on holiday in Scotland, my cousin told me about giant trout that lived in small numbers at the bottom of the Highlands deepest lochs. They were called salmo ferox, and they were rumoured to be uncatchable."In his twenties, wholly accidentally, Jon Berry caught one. This led to an obsession that would cost him every pound he had to his name, a few thousand that he did not, a couple of girlfriends and his home. It would take him to Scotland...

In November 1962, 20-year-old Oswald Augustus Grey, an immigrant from Jamaica who had been in the UK for less than two years, became the last man to be hanged in Birmingham’s Winson Green prison. There were only five further executions in the UK before capital punishment ended in 1965.His trial lasted fewer than five working days and his subsequent appeal less than an hour. There were 24 weeks between the crime and the execution.The law failed Oswald Grey. He was treated as...

Oswald Augustus Grey was a Jamaican immigrant. He was 20 years old when he was executed and 19 when the crime for which he was convicted took place. To talk to people who lived in the city at the time, or to scour the nostalgia forums that proliferate online, is to discover an episode that has almost entirely disappeared in terms of public remembrance. This book unearths something of a place and a society that allowed a young life to become expendable and forgotten. The Birmingham in which...

Teachers Undefeated is about how teachers continue to do the best for their students. They do so despite clumsy interventions from governments who have no idea how difficult they have made school life. They do so despite the fact that they are pressurized into producing dubious outcomes and are over-scrutinized in every aspect of their professional lives. The book is filled with testimony from teachers who still bring energy, creativity and commitment to everything they do. Jon Berry expla...

This book privileges the experience and knowledge of classroom teachers over marketization and the constant assessment of their students' performance. In 'Teachers Undefeated' Jon Berry found that teachers had not fallen for a reduced and meagre view of what children should be offered by schools. Now he writes about schools that have made a collective decision to abide by the principles of teaching and learning, confident that results will follow. Teachers, as well as parents and school go...

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZEThe original bestseller from the beloved author of UNDERLAND, LANDMARKS and THE LOST WORDS - Robert Macfarlane travels Britain's ancient paths and discovers the secrets of our beautiful, underappreciated landscape'The Old Ways confirms Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature' Scotland on ...

'The more I learned, the more I realised this was an Australia I hardly knew. This was stormy weather Australia, an Australia of shipwrecks and sealers; of brutality and extermination; of folly and heroism; of wild weather and explorers in flimsy boats; of thousand-foot cliffs and amazing birds and strange vegetation; of places well-trodden and others believed never to have felt the impact of a human foot. This was a truly gothic Australia, as real and as valid as the gold and the ...