I’m sorry but you won’t find here the just-in-time-for Christmas sports autobiography blockbusters. With just enough manufactured controversy to ensure blanket coverage when they are launched, even a skim read will reveal that, on the contrary, they tell the reader very little they didn’t either know or suspect already.

Floodlights and Touchlines by Rob Steen (Bloomsbury)

As a writer, Rob Steen straddles that frustrating divide between the academic and the journalistic. His new book Floodlights and Touchlines reveals the quality of writing this mix can sometimes produce. 

A living history of the relationship between the spectator and his, or increasingly as Rob chronicles, her sport. This is social history of the very highest standard.