Julian Norridge's Books

Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please?

How the British Invented Sport

By: Julian Norridge

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Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please?

How the British Invented Sport

By: Julian Norridge

Long before Drake refused to interrupt his game of bowls when the Armada was sighted, the British have had a passionate relationship with sport. Julian Norridge goes through the stories of fourteen major sports from cricket to boxing to football, from their very beginning and throughout the British Isles, whether it’s Welsh inventor and tobacco enthusiast Major Walter Clopton Wingfield coming up with a game that could use those new fangled rubber balls (modern tennis) or the Scots inventing the golf club – 500 years after the game. But this is far more than a book about sport, it takes a very funny, very British look at our popular history, mythology and most importantly the highly eccentric figures that made it. It chronicles the constant battle between fair play and gambling; between advances in the game and plain cheating (such as turning up with a cricket bat wider than the wicket). Can We Have Our Balls Back Please? proves that there is an awful lot to be proud of in our history and where that strange feeling of superiority really comes from. It shows why we get just so excited when we take on any other nation in any sporting event and are so disappointed when we lose...

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Page Count

567

Publisher

Penguin UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

0141903376

ISBN 13

9780141903378

Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please?

How the British Invented Sport (and Then Almost Forgot how to Play It)

By: Julian Norridge

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Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please?

How the British Invented Sport (and Then Almost Forgot how to Play It)

By: Julian Norridge

Americans may like to think they invented baseball (even if Jane Austen wrote about it decades earlier). And the French might be proud of founding the modern Olympics (when, in fact, a Shropshire doctor beat them to it by forty years). BUT IT WAS THE BRITISH THAT GAVE SPORT TO THE WORLD. From the beginnings of 'the beautiful game' - raucous matches of folk football with hundreds of players on each side - to the original bowls - a thin excuse for drunkenness and gambling - games grew into sports here in Great Britain. And in Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please? Julian Norridge tells their stories with wit and good humour. Including all the many sports we Brits have to be proud of - boxing, horse racing, cricket, football, rugby, hockey, lawn tennis (nearly called 'sphairistike') and more - and even those few that got away, this is everything you need to know about the very British love of sports and all the great games it's produced. Because, even if we rarely win them, it's good to know we invented them.

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Page Count

571

Publisher

Penguin UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

0141036168

ISBN 13

9780141036168

Imaginary Toys

By: Julian Mitchell

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Imaginary Toys

By: Julian Mitchell

Imaginary Toys (1961) marked the literary debut of the then 26-year-old Julian Mitchell, who would eventually set aside his prizewinning career as a novelist and achieve wider renown as a dramatist, most famously with Another Country (1981). Imaginary Toys is a novel of Oxford after World War Two, where class consciousness has become newly acute, and a quartet of narrators wrestle with their studies and their more personal difficulties - among the four a coalminer's son and the daughter of a solid bourgeois family, who fall in love to the discomfort of their respective friends. In the first of a sequence of reflective, autobiographical new introductions composed especially for Faber Finds' reissues of his early novels, Julian Mitchell recalls the atmosphere of mid-1950s Oxford, and the path he took to a literary vocation.

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Page Count

228

Publisher

Faber & Faber

Published Date

ISBN 10

0571304214

ISBN 13

9780571304219

Metroland

By: Julian Barnes

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Metroland

By: Julian Barnes

From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of A Sense of an Ending comes a comedy of sexual awakening in the 1960s that is “wonderfully fresh, crackling with nostalgic irreverence” (Vogue). Only the author of Flaubert's Parrot could give us a novel that is at once a note-perfect rendition of the angsts and attitudes of English adolescence, a giddy comedy of sexual awakening, and a portrait of the accommodations that some of us call "growing up" and others "selling out.

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Page Count

200

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307797775

ISBN 13

9780307797773

Book's by Julian Norridge

Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please?

Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please?

Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please?

Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please?

Imaginary Toys

Imaginary Toys

Metroland

Metroland

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