Almanac Books: ‘Sport and the British: A Modern History’ – Richard Holt

 

 

Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, Second Edition, 2025, ISBN 9780199557202, £24.99 net of GST and delivery charge.

 

When Richard Holt published the first edition of Sport and the British in 1989 it was immediately recognised as the best single volume coverage of the field as it was then. The new edition covers a hugely extended corpus of work published since, but it still ranks as the best around. The clarity of the writing and the choice of topics help set it apart. The author was the Director of the International Centre for Sports History at De Montfort University in Leicester, a key location for British scholars and overseas visitors. I was lucky enough to spend some time there during a year-long sabbatical and exchange in the United Kingdom in 2002-3. At that time Wray Vamplew was the Director and he and I had known each other since we were junior academics in Glasgow and Edinburgh in the 1960s. Later Wray spent several years at Flinders University in Adelaide. His own Games People Played is a very well received coverage of much of the same ground as Dick Holt’s work but more explicitly directed at a popular rather than an academic readership.

 

Roy Hay

 

 

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