Lovers of Amsterdam will revel in the exhaustive reconstruction of everyday life in the medieval city

A strong sense of irony and a lively prose style make Geert Mak's Amsterdam one of the most unusual and engaging 'city books' I have read this year

Mak's brief is... to bring Amsterdam into the modern age. This he does with wit and style. But his real achievement... is to make accessible unfussily - and unsentimentally - one of Europe's most astonishing urban success stories

This excellent book is more than essential

Smooth, pacey prose... fascinating

A bold and vivid history of football's disparate founding fathers

The football season hardly ends at all these days, but for literary (or at least literate) fans who miss it, there is Richard Sanders's Beastly Fury: The Strange Birth of British Football, which traces a game now bedevilled by preening, overpaid cheats back to a public-school culture of "egregious selfishness", and preening, unpaid cheats. Britain's peculiar relationship to professional sport is acutely analysed by Sanders, who asks the winningly unpatriotic question "if we invented football, how come we are so bad at it?", and finds the answer in our ignorance of foreign origins of the game, the cult of amateurishness, and a reluctance to accept the sport's (re-)democratization in the twentieth century.

Both entertaining and informative, Beastly Fury is an impeccably researched book telling an enthralling story in an easily read fluent style

Fascinating stuff

Shows that publishers continue to believe in a market for the thinking person's football book... a good historical read

A fine book... well-researched and superbly written

This original thesis, written with style, wit and authority, explains how the beastly game became more beautiful.

Delightful... a valuable work of social history

I have read many a prime ministerial memoir and none of the other authors has been as self-deprecating, as willing to admit mistakes and to tell jokes against themselves

Paints a candid picture of his friend and rival, Gordon Brown, and of their relationship