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Manslaughter United
Manslaughter United
Mar 24, 2025 7:53 AM

Author:Chris Hulme

Manslaughter United

People don't want to know us. They don't want to know we exist. We have all committed horrendous crimes, and they aren't going to understand why we're allowed to play football. But it's the only thing that makes our lives bearable. We play in a local league - home games only - and it doesn't matter then who you are or what you've done, you can still be a hero on match day. For those ninety minutes it's your FA Cup, your European Cup, your World Cup.

Zebedee, Teddy, Bunny, Nigel, Scouse, Raph, Bumpy, Wayne, Carl, Paddy and Rizler. Eleven men - a football team. In every British town there are hundreds of amateur football teams. This team has the usual sprinkling of talent, but is otherwise unique. Nine of these players have been convicted of murder and are serving life-sentences in HMP Kingston, the other two are their warders.

Chris Hulme spent a season with the Kingston Arrows - watching every game, talking to them about their lives on the inside and out and supporting them in their attempt to win the league for the first time in ten years of trying. MANSLAUGHTER UNITED - the story of the hardest football team in England.

Reviews

An extraordinary book. Buy it, read it, treasure it

—— Sunday Times

Porridge meets Escape to Victory. A witty, moving and wholly original read

—— Daily Mirror

Electrifying... a riveting account of what football can mean when you, quite literally have nothing else to live for

—— Pete Davies

A great slice of sports writing

—— Total Football

A moving, enthralling and extraordinary book

—— Maxim

Poignant, articulate and at times very funny

—— Alasdair Fotheringham , Independent

This exceptional title is a must for anyone (which includes me) who doesn’t quite understand the psychology of a professional cyclist.

—— Graham Watson , Cycle Sport

A fascinating insight into the life of a seasoned pro cyclist… I doubt that many riders could make such a story as readable and informative as Millar.

—— Road.cc

A superb, intensely poetic collection of essays.

—— Sunday Times

Wroe has become a daredevil writer… Light of myriad types may blaze in the mind’s eye of the reader…elegantly produced, lightly illustrated volume… Wroe’s style here is rhapsodic and meditative.

—— Stoddard Martin , Literary Review

A passionate and meandering love letter to a natural phenomenonSix Facets of Light reads as if you are in Wroe's mind, listening to her mosey from her own astute observations to celebrations of light by famous names. The pace of the narrative is just like going on a long, rambling walk on the South Downs Way in summer, making it a book best enjoyed at your leisure in the great outdoors.

—— Mary Ann Pickford , Irish News

[A] remarkable new book… Felicities of phrasing and cadence on every page…each of the six chapters offers something of the taut coherence and closeness of the structure of musical variation.

—— Peter Davidson , Tablet

[A] remarkable new book… A love song to light… Ann Wroe is perfectly equipped to deal with this rich mix.

—— Piers Plowright , Camden Review

A unique voice in nonfictionSix Facets of Light exists in a world of quivering immanence.

—— Kathryn Hughes , Guardian

She switches from thoughts about an English lane to Coleridge, Thoreau, Samuel Palmer, larks, ragwort and Ravilious’s taste in poetry, in effortless and beguiling succession.

—— Royal Academy

A wide-ranging and imaginative work of non-fiction… Never less than engaging.

—— Erica Wagner , New Statesman

Six Facets of Light is dazzlingly original.

—— Lucy Hughes-Hallett , Guardian

Six Facets of Light is a book that is making me look and think more closely, and closer again. In its own way this feels like a hymn of praise, a thanksgiving and a celebration of something replete with mystery… Slowly the shackles of modern scientific thought and progress and theory slip away and I find myself observing light as if I have only just realised it existed. How clever a book has to be to achieve that.

—— Dove Grey Reader

A genre-crossing consideration of what light has meant to writers, painters and lovers of landscape.

—— Oldie

Inspiring, beautifully written.

—— Sunday Times

An exquisitely written study of light in the works of various poets and painters.

—— Daily Telegraph

A wonderful literary meditation… This book is suffused with vivid personal memory and precise, delicate observation of Nature. Wroe’s feeling for landscape is both sensitive and acute; her style is lyrical and precise.

—— Hugo Davenport , Resurgence and Ecologist

A book for winter.

—— Honor Clerk , Spectator, Books of the Year

People of faith talk a great deal about light, and we would do well to learn more about it from Wroe’s quick-eyed love of it.

—— Mark Oakley , Church Times

Wroe passes her elusive subject, light itself, through the prism of her dazzlingly well-read mind, and the resulting rainbows fairly dance across the page… An utterly original book that will leave you, in every sense of the word, enlightened.

—— Claire Lowdon , Sunday Times, Book of the Year

Ann Wroe’s Six Facets of Light is a fascinating and original meditation [on light]. Six Facets of Light is an exquisite collage of relations, a prose poem to “what escaped” absolutely everyone – and to how madly, brilliantly, they tried to “be in step”.

—— Joanna Kavenna , Times Literary Supplement
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