Book reviews

The Peter Taylor Story Volume One
by Wendy Dickinson & Stafford Hildred
Matador, £17.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 286 December 2010

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Gus van Sant makes films – Elephant, Final Days – that focus on a series of incidents viewed from complex mesh of different viewpoints. Maybe one day he'll turn his attention to the story of Brian Clough. Certainly there are already more than enough angles available on the bookshelves. Indeed, with new volumes appearing almost monthly (two more Clough biographies are slated for next year, and another one on Don Revie is on the way) it's hard to avoid a feeling that what we have here might be, to bowdlerise the words of Nigel Tufnell, "too much perspective".

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Tommy Lawton – My Friend, My Father
by Barrie Williams and Tom Lawton Junior
Vision Sports, £16.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 288 February 2011

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"Notts County will be the Arsenal of the Midlands." If anything demonstrates the cyclical nature of football it's this comment made by Magpies chairman Len Machin back in the summer of 1957. It is a statement that has been echoed in one form or another ever since by the owners and directors of provincial clubs – including, naturally, those of Notts County.

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by Paul Merson
HarperSport, £16.99
Reviewed by Tom Lines
From WSC 292 June 2011

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Most football memoirs carefully ration the racy bits as a way of punctuating the otherwise straightforward retelling of a career. How Not To Be A Professional Footballer does precisely the opposite. Cast adrift with Merse on a seemingly endless sea of lager, cocaine and crumpled betting slips, the sensitive reader ends up desperately scanning the horizon for Alan Shearer paddling towards them aboard an uncreosoted fence panel.

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50 years of trials and triumph with football’s 
also-rans
by Tim Quelch
XPublisher, £14.99
Reviewed by Nick Miller
From WSC 301 March 2012

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Part memoir, part collection of anecdotes and – perhaps slightly surprisingly – part modern history, Underdog! is a collection of stories about when the improbable occurs in football. There are the obvious tales, such as Wimbledon winning the 1988 FA Cup, along with more obscure stories, like the Northampton Town side that reached Division One in the mid-1960s.

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A History In Ten Matches
by Jonathan Wilson
Orion, £14.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 281 July 2010

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Jonathan Wilson produces so much high-class writing about football that, had I not met him on a couple of occasions, I'd be tempted to believe he was actually a workers' collective. The Anatomy of England is Wilson's fourth book on the game and while the subject – the England national team in all its splendid misery – might seem less exotic, esoteric and altogether more familiar than those covered in his excellent Behind the Curtain and Inverting the Pyramid the result is every bit as thought-provoking and entertaining.

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