Michael Davie
ASTONISHINGLY, Sport and the British by Richard Holt (Clarendon Press, £19.50) is the first serious attempt to make sense of sport as part of the general social history of modern Britain. Mr Holt, an academic, is quite capable of taking on the grim sociologists of sport, but he wisely confines his bout with their abstractions to an appendix and concentrates instead on more interesting themes, such as why rugby football is a middle-class game in England but 'the one great pastime of the people' in Wales; the importance of sport in the Empire; the persecution of early female bicyclists in their `Rationale' (rational clothes; e.g. bloomers) or the genesis of the uniquely British notion of `fair play'.
The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry, edited by Hugh Haughton (Chatto & Windus, £12.95) is another scholarly eye- opener about a subject of great popular appeal hitherto neglected by academics. Haughton has dug up examples even of German nonsense. It turns out that non- sense is not nonsense at all, but an exhilar- ating way of dealing with serious matters. The book was published late last year, but far too few people seem to know about it and the intense pleasure it would give them, and their children, if they did.
Most overrated book of the year: Nor- man Sherry's flat-footed biography of Gra- ham Greene (Cape, £17.50).
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