Are You Watching Liverpool

In the year England failed to qualify for the World Cup, it seemed Manchester United were destined to carry all before them, hoovering up domestic football trophies with the enthusiasm of a kleptomaniac. Jim White followed the colossi of English football through a campaign of stratospheric highs and catastrophic lows. From Istanbul to Ipswich, Budapest to the Boleyn Road, he travelled with the team and with the fans, getting to the heart of the most formidable football machine this country has ever seen.

Football has never seemed so distant from its fans. Many have been alienated by the greed and shameless self-interest of the Premier League, and no one can predict how the global game will look post-pandemic. In Whose Game Is It Anyway?, Sunday Times best-selling author Michael Calvin searches for a reason to believe. Written at the height of the Covid-19 crisis, the book is a thought-provoking, deeply personal account of the role sport - and particularly football - plays in everyday life. Part memoir, part manifesto, it takes the reader on a tour of the world's greatest sporting occasions and into its outposts in sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon Basin and the Southern Ocean. Drawn from Calvin's experience as an award-winning sportswriter, covering every major sports event over 40 years in more than 80 countries, it offers first-hand insight into such icons as Muhammad Ali, Maradona and Sir Bobby Charlton. With settings ranging from a jungle clearing to a township in apartheid South Africa, this is sport as you've never seen it before.

This book is one of a selection of titles by British photographers, supported by the Arts Council, showing the most outstanding work produced in this country. Since 1982 when Marlow went from The Sunday Times to Liverpool, he became obsessed both with the poverty and the vitality of the city and its people. He has returned frequently to the city to record the decline of a great maritime tradition and has created one of the most harrowing social documents of Britain during the last ten years.

Liverpool was once one of the greatest cities in the British empire but it no longer feels like it is in England, if it ever did. It had retreated as a significant port after the Second World War and by 1979, it was already on the brink. What it needed was support but instead, a Conservative Party with aggressive new ideas allowed it to slide. Thirty-years after the Toxteth Riots, classified government papers revealed that the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was urged to abandon the city and embark on a programme of 'managed decline'. Why did Liverpool's fortunes change so dramatically? Why did it fight back when other cities did not? This is the untold story of what it was like for Liverpool's people and how the period defines who they are.

'When The Kop is roaring it really is like having a twelfth man out there on the pitch. They're the best fans in the country - by miles.' Jamie Carragher The Spion Kop is one of the most famous, emotive and atmospheric vantage points in all of sport. The one-time terracing that could 'suck the ball into the net' - in Bill Shankly's immortal phrase - still inspires and intimidates today. Once the home of more than 25,000 swaying, singing, standing Kopites, it's now seated and can hold merely half that number, but its magic still remains. In this fully revised and updated edition, Stephen F Kelly uses eyewitness testimonies from Kopites, policemen, cleaners and referees as well as newspaper reports and the recollections of players and managers to trace the history of this amazing and fascinating stand - each anecdote wonderfully evoking the spirit of the changing times the Kop has experienced. Stirring, emotional and marvellously readable, The Kop is a must for any Liverpool fan and anyone interested in what it means to be a supporter of any football club.

A baby blown out of an upstairs window by a WWII bomb lives to hear others tell the tale… A woman embarks on a long-term obsession with a city landmark, abandoning her lover for the Liver… A bricklayer working on the foundations of a never-built cathedral becomes its evangelist, its full splendour soaring only in his mind… Bringing together fiction from some of the city’s most celebrated writers, The Book of Liverpool traces the unique contours that decades of social and economic change can impress on a city. Set against key historical moments from the Second World War to the Capital of Culture year, these stories question what ‘belonging’ and ‘home’ mean in the Liverpudlian context, from the regenerated city centre to satellite suburbs, from the sparring cathedrals to the no-go concrete housing estates. Liverpool emerges in these short stories as a city in constant flux: haunted by ghosts, buoyed up by myths, and shifting with an ebb and flow like the Mersey itself. "A literary gem that will share a niche in my library with M.R. James and E. F. Benson..." - Metapsychology online Read review. "Words thrive here, carried on the saline breeze of the Mersey and twisted round agile tongues into sentences as resilient as the sandstone blocks in the Town Hall walls..." - The Liverpool Daily Post, 11 Jul 08 Read review.