The Prisoner of Brenda by Colin Bateman (Headline 2012)

She came into No Alibis, the finest mystery bookshop in all of Belfast, bedraggled from the autumn wind and rain and sleet and hail, pulled her red hood down and spluttered hello and long time no see and wouldn’t this be a great wee country if we just had nice weather, all in one puffy gasp, and I gave her the look I keep for idiots who deserve to be struck about the head with a hammer, but made sure to add a welcoming smile just to confuse her. Times were hard in the book trade, and one couldn’t afford to look a horse-face in the gift-mouth.

I did in fact recognise her, because I never forget a long toothy gob, but I wasn’t sure if she would remember me. She had been nice to me in the past, but that was no guarantee of anything. People change, or they have ulterior motives. You have to be on your guard at all times. I have been stabbed in the back thousands of times and have the mental scars to prove it, and one physical one where Mother caught me with a fish hook.

She stood there, dripping, and said, ‘So how are you? How have you been?’

‘Fine,’ I said. There was a small sign hanging from the till that said Ask About Our Christmas Club. It was not aligned properly. I fixed it. Despite this, she did not ask. After a while I remembered to say, ‘How are you?’

My on-off girlfriend Alison had lately been coaching me in the niceties, but I found them difficult, and ultimately, hypocritical. I didn’t care how she was. I didn’t care how anyone was. What was the point? We were all going to die.

‘You do remember me, don’t you?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Nurse Brenda.’

She smiled. ‘Nurse Brenda,’ she repeated.

‘Nurse Brenda,’ I said.”

Murphy's Mob by Michael Saunders (Puffin Books 1982)

Dunmore United was a lousy football club. They were bottom of the fourth division, and they had almost lost their place in that last season, but when Mac Murphy saw they were looking for a new manager he was in no position to be choosy. He'd been demoted himself, sacked by the first division club he'd been managing when they were relegated last season. His wife, Elaine, was all in favour when he mentioned Dunmore United. And so the two of them drove down to the Midlands one drizzly summer's afternoon to keep an appointment with Dunsmore's new owner, Rasputin Jones.

"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt (Steerforth Press 2004)

"I spent the war as a rifleman in Europe in the Thunderbird Division—the 45th Infantry Division. They say the average number of days of actual combat for a veteran is around eighty. By the time the war was over the Army told me I had 411 combat days, which entitled me to $20 extra pay a month. I was one of the lucky ones. The real heroes, some of them with only one combat day, are still over there. As big a target as I was and as many fire fights as I was in, I never got hit by a German bullet or shrapnel. I said a lot of foxhole prayers, especially pinned down in a dugout in Anzio. And whatever anybody wants to say about my childhood, one thing my childhood did teach me was how to take care of myself, how to survive.”

The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War by David Lebedoff (Random House 2008)

On that same balmy night in June of 1930, while Waugh was amusing the duchess, a young man of the same age but very different appearance, Eric Blair, was working alone in a small, shabby room in the working-class section of Leeds, a manufacturing city in the north. He was the unwelcome guest of his brother-in-law, who regarded this lodger as a penniless failure with no job and no future.

This opinion was shared by almost everyone acquainted with Blair. It was a relatively small group but one that included several experts on failure; they had learned about it firsthand. Blair looked, and often smelled, like a tramp, because he was one. He, however, made the distinction that he wasn’t really a tramp, but only chose to be among tramps to free himself from class prejudices about poverty and dirt. He put it this way: “When you have shared a bed with a tramp and drunk tea out of the same snuff-tin, you feel that you have seen the worst and the worst has no terrors for you.

Men in White Suits: Liverpool FC in the 1990s - The Players' Stories by Simon Hughes (Bantam Press 2015)

Mangotsfield United saw enough in Tanner to ask him to training, where he first met the late Ralph Miller, a legendary non-league manager, who was a builder by trade.

‘I enjoyed playing under Ralph more than Bobby Gould, Gerry Francis, Kenny Dalglish or Graeme Souness,’ Tanner beams. ‘He loved players that got stuck in, and I was one of them. He was an old-school psychologist, a bit like Bill Shankly, I suppose. The funny stories are endless.’

Tanner recalls one.

‘There was a player that he desperately wanted to sign for Mangotsfield. Problem was, the fella lived in South Wales. So he drove over the bridge in his van with a bicycle in the back. He pleaded with the fella at his front door. “Look, I’ve cycled all the  way over here from Bristol to sign you.” The lad looked at his bike. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You must really want me.” So he signed the forms there and then. Ralph rode around the corner and chucked his bike in the back of the van before driving home.

‘When I was about eighteen, we decided to go on our first lads’ holiday to Magaluf. To prepare for the holiday I decided to get myself fit, so I went out running every day – did sit-ups, press-ups, the lot. It was the fittest I’ve ever been. After our first pre-season session back at Mangotsfield, I got out of the shower looking all bronzed. “Fuck me,” Ralph went. “You’ve got a body like Tarzan and a prick like Jane!”’

In the mid-eighties, Bristol Rovers were, as Tanner puts it, ‘in financial shit’ and needing players that would play for practically nothing, so manager Bobby Gould scoured the Gloucestershire and Somerset county leagues for undiscovered talent.

‘Rovers signed Gary Penrice, Phil Purnell, Gary Smart and myself from Mangotsfield, all for the princely sum of two floodlight bulbs. I can still remember Ralph turning up at Eastville Stadium while all of us were playing in a reserve game, shouting at the top of his voice, “Where’s my money, Gouldy?” That was Ralph all over. In later years he came to Anfield to watch me play and said how proud he was of me, which touched me, coming from such a hard man.'