The intriguing story and turbulent history of a paper Charles Dickens praised for its ‘range of information and profundity of knowledge’, and which Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, simply endorsed with the remark: ‘Of course I read The Sporting Life’. It was the Queen Mother’s love of horseracing that made her such an avid reader of the Life and coverage of that sport forms the core of this book, but there is so much more to fascinate the reader including eyewitness accounts of the first fight for the heavyweight championship of the world and Captain Webb’s heroic Channel swim of 1875. Highlights in the history of cricket, football and rugby are also featured, while chapters on coursing and greyhound racing rank alongside surreal reports on ratting contests and songbird singing competitions. And for 30 years Tommy Wisdom made his motoring reports unique by competing against the best at Brooklands, Le Mans and in many Monte Carlo rallies, while Henry Longhurst’s golfing column was simply the best. The paper’s strident campaigns for racing reforms are also chronicled along with its coverage of major news stories, from Fred Archer’s shocking suicide to its own untimely demise. Its travails in the law courts are documented from its first year, when it was forced to change its title, to its last, when it had to pay libel damages to the training team of Lynda and Jack Ramsden and their jockey, Kieren Fallon. A higher price was paid by its French correspondent who was killed in a duel over an article he had written, while the terrible toll the First World War took on the nation’s sporting heroes is catalogued by the Life’s embedded army correspondent, against a background of political bungling that is being repeated today.

DIVThe Marquess of Queensberry is as famous for his role in the downfall of one of our greatest literary geniuses as he was for helping establish the rules for modern-day boxing. The trial and two-year imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, lover of Queensberry’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, remains one of literary history’s great tragedies. However, Linda Stratmann's riveting biography of the Marquess paints a far more complex picture by drawing on new sources and unpublished letters. Throughout his life, Queensberry was emotionally damaged by a series of tragedies, and the events of the Wilde affair—told for the first time from the Marquess’s perspective—were directly linked to Queensberry’s personal crises. Through the retelling of pivotal events from Queensberry’s life—the death of his brother on the Matterhorn and his fruitless search for the body; the suicides of his father, brother, and eldest son—the book reveals a well-meaning man often stricken with a grief he found hard to express, who deserves our compassion./div

A large-scale reference work covering the journalism industry in 19th-Century Britain.

Jerry White's London in the Nineteenth Century is the richest and most absorbing account of the city's greatest century by its leading expert. London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its growth was stupendous. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. This was the London of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday and Disraeli. Most of all it was the London of Dickens. As William Blake put it, London was 'a Human awful wonder of God'. In Jerry White's dazzling history we witness the city's unparalleled metamorphosis over the course of the century through the daily lives of its inhabitants. We see how Londoners worked, played, and adapted to the demands of the metropolis during this century of dizzying change. The result is a panorama teeming with life.

While the history of the uniformed police has prompted considerable research, the historical study of police detectives has been largely neglected; confined for the most part to a chapter or a brief mention in books dealing with the development of the police in general. The collection redresses this imbalance. Investigating themes central to the history of detection, such as the inchoate distinction between criminals and detectives, the professionalisation of detective work and the establishment of colonial police forces, the book provides a the first detailed examination of detectives as an occupational group, with a distinct occupational culture. Essays discuss the complex relationship between official and private law enforcers and examine the ways in which the FBI in the U.S.A. and the Gestapo in Nazi Germany operated as instruments of state power. The dynamic interaction between the fictional and the real life image of the detective is also explored. Expanding on themes and approaches introduced in recent academic research of police history, the comparative studies included in this collection provide new insights into the development of both plain-clothes policing and law enforcement in general, illuminating the historical importance of bureaucratic and administrative changes that occurred within the state system.

Covering a time of great social and technological change, this history traces the development of the four classic aquatic disciplines of competitive swimming, diving, synchronized swimming and water polo, with its main focus on racing. Working from the beginnings of municipal recreational swimming, the book fully explores the links between swimming and other aspects of English life society including class, education, gender, municipal governance, sexuality and the Victorian invention of the sports amateur-professional divide. Uniquely focused on swimming -often neglected in analytic sports histories- this is the first study of its kind and will be an important landmark in the establishment of swimming history as a topic of scholarly investigation. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

At the heart of this text strides James Catton, less than five feet tall but a giant in the field of sporting journalism. It is the story of his career, from boy reporter in 1870s Lancashire to editor of the influential Manchester-based weekly Athletic News and then grand old man of Fleet Street sports writing in the 1920s and ’30s. The book also presents the story of others, too—the first journalists to turn action into news as raw, carnivalesque, violent pastimes were replaced by codified and commercialised games. Detailing the history of their trade, the book searches for the roots of sports journalism, pushing, for the first time, the newspaper reporter to the foreground in the shared history of the press and sport. Editorial recruitment, training, writing styles, pay, status, rivalry and camaraderie, technology, celebrity, the press box, the player-reporter and drinking culture are all examined, as are the values men like Catton claimed sport, at its best, represented.