Love it or hate it, football is one of the most successful institutions ever spawned in these islands. The sheer speed with which a random blend of mud, testosterone and Anglo-Saxon eccentricity evolved into a world game, not to mention a multi-billion-pound industry, still has the power to set the pulse racing. It is a story that has been told many times, but Richard Sanders not only retells it with scholarly zeal, but gives it a new slant... His book is as much a social history as a sporting history, and all the better for it... Beastly Fury can be warmly recommended to anyone curious about the origins of the modern game

There is no shortage of football stories. It is one of the subtle triumphs of Richard Sanders's book that he brings another tale gently into the light. Beastly Fury is a bright, breezy account of the beginnings of football. Sanders kicks off with a rush and his pace rarely slackens but something of substance emerges. The author has a keen eye for the personal anecdote whether it be the eccentric goalkeeper or the club secretary who is consumed by ambition. But the significance of Beastly Fury is that it lays bare just how football was born, nurtured and grew on the back of class movements... succint but acute... engaging but quietly serious

Sanders's meticulous research is persuasive... [an] original thesis, written with style, wit and authority

Well written and thoughtful... extremely good indeed

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

Utterly absorbing, a really good read, sensitive and balanced and surely the definitive last word on the subject

Rappaport narrates her story in an original fashion, focusing on the final two weeks inside the Ipatiev House before the murders

Brilliantly shows how history is never simple but always enthralling when written with this style

Extraordinary and powerful ... Having uncovered enlightening new sources, Rappaport has produced a highly accessible account of the last 14 days in the lives of the former tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra and their children

Riveting account of turbulence, social upheaval and murder in early 20th-century Russia, which draws on new evidence uncovered in the icy, remote city where Tsar Nicholas and his family met their bloody deaths. Juxtaposing fascinating domestic details with analysis of the international political scene, the author strips away the romance of their incarceration and the mythology surrounding their murders to reveal an extraordinary human situation and its seismic worldwide repercussions

Rappaport precisely imagines those last few days ... As the pages turn quickly towards an end that is never in doubt, a picture emerges of a devout, loving and rather commonplace family

The great strength of Rappaport's book is her tight focus on the royal family's final three months in the Iaptiev House... She has told the human story, and the truly appalling tale of what man can do to man

A tragic and thrilling account ... Ekaterinburg is really a twofold triumph for Helen Rappaport ... On top of the impressive level of research that Rappaport has conducted in order to produce Ekaterinburg, she also has an excellent and engaging writing style and succeeds in maintaining the tension and mood throughout ... Gritty and compelling