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Sport and the Military: The British Armed Forces 1880-1960 / Eliza Riedi, Tony Mason
Review Date: 30 April 2011
In Handley Cross, an early Victorian sporting novel, Mr. Jorrocks defends fox-hunting as ‘“the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent of its danger”’.(1) In their co-authored work, Tony Mason and Eliza Riedi examine this interplay between sport and war and illustrate the importance of sport to the British military over the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Amateurism in British Sport: It Matters Not Who Won or Lost? / eds. Dilwyn Porter, S. Wagg
Review Date: 01 August 2008
There are very few books about amateurism. But it is also true that most books about sport in the century before 1960 are about amateurism because it was the idea dominant in the politics and administration of sport. One can no more ignore amateurism in the development of modern sport than one could ignore religion in medieval politics.
A Social History of Swimming in England, 1800-1918 / Christopher Love
Review Date: 01 August 2008
Over the past 40 years sport has gained credibility as a field of academic study. This is evident in the expansion of participant and spectator sport worldwide, supported by an ever-increasing range of sport related programmes offered at colleges and universities and ever-increasing research opportunities.
Sport and Society in Victorian Ireland: The Case of Westmeath / Tom Hunt
Review Date: 31 July 2008
Until the last decade, scholarly work on the history of sport and leisure in Ireland was most noted by its absence. Historians of modern Ireland almost entirely ignored the importance of sport as a historical phenomenon, preferring to concentrate on matters of church and state.