The Sports Bookshelf

Television sports presenter Clare Balding leads a strong sporting line-up at the Ilkley Literature Festival, which began today in the beautiful Yorkshire spa town and continues for the next two and a half weeks. Clare will be talking about her newly-published memoir, My Animals and Other Family , at the Kings Hall on Friday, October 12 (7.30pm). My Animals and Other Family (Viking) is a memoir of Clare's early life at the racing stables run by her father, Ian Balding, where she sat astride legendary thoroughbreds such as Mill Reef, winner of the Derby and the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, and would sometimes walk into the family kitchen to find the Queen sitting at the breakfast table. Tour de France winner Stephen Roche , rugby league giant Robbie Paul and former England Test batsman Ed Smith are other sports stars who will be appearing at the Festival. Roche, the Irishman who won the cycling triple crown of Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and world championshi

Even in this year, dominated as it has been by the most memorable of Olympics, made even more special, on the UK side of the Atlantic at least, by the sight of a British male tennis player winning a major, the Ryder Cup still manages to capture the attention of sports fans. Even if somehow you've had the time for no more than a cursory glance at a newspaper these last few days,  or caught only a few minutes of a television sports bulletin, you will be aware of the intensifying anticipation of this week's 39th edition of golf's unique team event, peppered by some notable tub-thumping on the part of the players, not all of it polite. It has become, in the eyes of those taking part, golf's fifth major, a tournament as meaningful as any that they play, filling a need perhaps they did not even realise they had as they were devoting their formative years to honing their swings and perfecting their putts in solitary hours of blinkered practice.  While so many of th

Anthony Clavane, award-winning author of Promised Land: A Northern Love Story, is to make a personal appearance at the independent Wivenhoe Bookshop in the Essex village of the same name next Tuesday to talk about his new book, Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here? One of the themes of Promised Land was the development of the Jewish community in Leeds and their involvement with Leeds United. In Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here? Clavane expands on that theme to investigate the Jewish influence on English football on a much wider scale, from the earliest Jewish footballers to the businessmen who helped transform the sport from a working class diversion to the status it now enjoys as a multi-million pound branch of the entertainment industry. Football has a long association with the Jewish business world and current club owners Roman Abramovich (Chelsea), Randy Lerner (Aston Villa) and the Glazer family (Manchester United) are only its latest high profile representatives.

Neville Southall's unvarnished account of his life in football is reviewed with approval by Eric Brown on the Sports Journalists' Association website. The Binman Chronicles , written with the help of Liverpool-born journalist James Corbett , charts Southall's rise from odd-jobbing non-League goalkeeper to becoming a fixture between the sticks for Everton and Wales, in a career that saw him with two League championships, two FA Cups and a European Cup-Winners' Cup, as well as an MBE. Brown is impressed with Southall's honest appraisal of the managers, players and officials he encountered as well as his thought-provoking views on Hillsborough and Heysel, and with how he takes no prisoners in assessing Everton's fall from football superpower to also-rans. "His frank opinions in this book on the many players, managers and officials whose paths he crossed in 30-odd years are entertaining and insightful. Southall’s reflections on the Hillsborough and H

Clare Balding is hardly new to television, and hardly new to winning television awards.  She picked up her first in 2003, when she was named Sports Presenter of the Year by the Royal Television Society, by which time she was long established as the face of BBC's horse racing coverage and was looking ahead to her third Olympics, having covered Atlanta for BBC radio and Sydney for television. Since then she has become a popular and authoritative voice at Wimbledon for 5 Live and has embraced rugby league, of all sports, with the same enthusiasm and professionalism that characterises all her work.  Drafted in to help with the BBC's Diamond Jubilee coverage, she met the challenge with seemingly effortless aplomb. Yet London 2012, her fifth summer Games, has somehow elevated her from admired and respected -- a description, you suspect, with which she would have been entirely satisfied, even as an epitaph -- to the status of national treasure in the echelons of broadcasting.  

Steve James has won the 2012 Cricket Writers' Club award for Cricket Book of the Year for his excellent dissection of England's rise to number one cricket team in the world, The Plan. Subtitled How Fletcher and Flower Transformed English Cricket , the book essentially charts the journey the England team embarked upon when they were officially the worst team in world cricket in 1999 to their coronation as the best, holding the No 1 Test ranking, in 2011, analysing how they were guided there by the two Zimbabwean coaches, Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower. The Plan begins with the appointment of Fletcher as England's first overseas coach in 1999, alongside Nasser Hussain as captain, and takes the reader through the subsequent captaincies of Michael Vaughan, Andrew Flintoff and, briefly and turbulently, Kevin Pietersen, through Peter Moores's time as coach, and on to the era of Flower and Andrew Strauss.  James examines in depth how each event and decision along the

The latest episode in the Kevin Pietersen saga came too late for James Anderson to lay into his ostracised teammate in his new book. Not that he would have been wise to, anyway, given the furore that followed Graeme Swann's honest but entirely polite criticism of KP's leadership qualities. Jimmy: My Story made the transition from interviews to words on the page in the skilled hands of the same ghostwriter who worked with Swann on The Breaks Are Off, in which the England off-spinner suggested that Pietersen was 'not a natural leader'. The comment was one that Andy Flower, the England coach, felt Swann should have kept to himself while the two were sharing a dressing room, while Pietersen responded by saying that it was 'not a clever book (to write) in the middle of your career'. No surprise, then, that fast bowler Anderson confines his comments to former teammates such as his ex-captains, Michael Vaughan, whose leadership style he didn't care for,

Lance Armstrong's continuing denial that he took performance-enhancing drugs is at odds with claims made by his former team-mate, Tyler Hamilton, in a new book. Hamilton's book  The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France - Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs  (Bantam Press) alleges that Armstrong was doping during his first three Tour de France wins. Himself banned three times after testing positive for performance enhancing drugs, former Tour winner Hamilton claims Armstrong was so open about using EPO he would keep it in the fridge, next to the milk. The book was conceived in 2009, when Hamilton and Daniel Coyle met for dinner at a restaurant in Boulder, Colorado. The two had met five years before while Coyle was writing his bestselling book, Lance Armstrong: Tour de Force. During the interim years, however, Tyler had been sitting on a lot of information he had not previously disclosed, not just about Armstrong but the sport of cycling in