Jason Cowley

"the Premier League is not an English league anymore, it simply hosts the world league"

English football can be divided into BPL (before Premier League) and PL (Premier League).
The decades of the 70s and 80s BPL were ultimately defined by hooliganism, ugliness, and homegrownness. They represented a post WWII Thatcherite class-warfare England. 95% of the players were Englishmen with a smattering of Irish, Scots, and Welshmen. The country and the players were under the false delusion that show more England was the top of the football mountain; that Liverpool was top of the football world; that the banning from European football was an egregious wrong. And then, at the end of the decade, 1989, Liverpool was shockingly taken down by an upstart crow Arsenal team full of youngsters and and a couple of foreigners. Huge underdogs comprised of more than one non-white skinned player. The recent tragedy at Hillsborough resulted in the deaths of scores of helpless fans, and the resulting self-examination of English football and everything it stood for. The end of an era. The end of English football. The beginning of the nineties. The creation of the Premier League. The super league that, although played on English soil, would see the English players be reduced to 30% of the participants. Super stadiums. Sky-high ticket prices. Astronomical player and manager salaries. And a massive world-wide audience. The best football in the world. The poor lower classes that constituted the vast majority of the football-attending crowds of the BPL were rapidly replaced by those that could afford the PL £100 tickets. Foreign owners and managers (it took a German manager Klopp to finally bring Liverpool its first top of the table finish in 2020); the best players in the world (mostly foreigners); the greatest show on Earth.
If you're a Premier League fanatic, you need to read this book. It's an eye-opener. Come on you lads! show less

This is an excellent book size issue of a UK literary magazine which carries the subtitle of "The Magazine of New Writing". This was issue 101 from Spring 2008 and is incredibly diverse. A couple of the highlights for me included a short piece by Hilary Mantel that amazed me in just a few pages describing something she acquired in Saudia Arabia in 1984. An outstanding piece of non-fiction on 'The Paris Intifada' let me see a part of modern Paris that I had no idea about and let me have a new show more understanding of what is going on there. There was also a remarkable man on the street view of what happened in Beijing to prepare for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. There are several fiction pieces in here which were perhaps the weakest part of the material, but nothing terrible in the fiction. Annie Proulx's story about a family was good but the end didn't feel right. There was also an interesting photo essay of the Arctic, a strong piece concerning pilots during the war in Angola and many other interesting things and I can only hope that other issues come close to this quality. show less

This is a fantastic collection of essays, memiors, stories and diaries of the most renowned travel / nature / landscape writers I know (Raban, MacFarlane, Marsden, Deakin etc.) As varied as they all are, it's always about man within or in relation to nature, about nature in relation to civilisation. As could be expected, very fine pieces that bring out nature's strengths / importance even more as it isn't examined isolated but in context.

It's reassuring to know that in a culture permeated with mediocrity and mindless trash, there are still people creating serious and thoughtful work and the means still exist of transmitting this work to its audience. Sadly though, having worked my way through this volume there is nothing which sticks out positively in the memory. The strongest reaction was created by Kathleen Jamie's piece recounting visits to a pathology lab in order to draw attention to the fact that "nature" is not just show more fields, trees and fluffy lambs but also encompasses the germs, viruses and organisms which ultimately bring out our individual demise. Unfortunately, being one of those squeamish types who cannot even watch medical dramas on TV, I couldn't even bring myself to read that piece in its entirety. Other essays that I did complete have failed to leave their mark. show less