This book takes a look at the development and heritage of one Britains most famous and iconic football teams Liverpool, from the golden age. Step back in time to when the founding fathers of the club first trod the turf at Anfield, through to Bill Shankly’s arrival and subsequent regeneration that put the Merseyside team firmly on the football map. The famous Boot Room and its occupants are explored, along with the success stories, quotes and trivia. There are player profiles of the greats including Kenny Dalglish, Roger Hunt, Ray Clemence, Kevin Keegan and Billy Liddell along with the great coaches that have managed the club. Liverpool FC achieved enormous highs through its golden age with a bursting trophy cabinet, but also suffered incredible lows that perhaps ended the era. Despite this, the club and its fans kept their heads above the parapet and further enabled the incredible Liverpool legacy. Look back on those fantastic unforgettable glory days from yesteryear with the help of this book and see just why LFC is such a special club in so many hearts.
The post-war era was British speedway’s golden age. Ten million spectators passed through the turnstiles of a record number of tracks at the sport’s peak. With league gates as high as 80,000, speedway offered a colourful means of escape from the grim austerity of the times.A determinedly clean image, with no betting and rival fans mingling on the terraces, made speedway the family night out of choice. The sport thrived despite punitive taxation and Government threats to close down the speedways as a threat to industrial productivity.A three-division National League stretched from Exeter to Edinburgh and the World Championship Final attracted a capacity audience to Wembley. Test matches against Australia provided yet another international dimension.Even at the height of its popularity, speedway was a sporting edifice built on unstable foundations, which crumbled alarmingly as the 1950s dawned and Britain’s economic and social recovery brought competing attractions like television.
Kenny Dalglish's relationship with Liverpool Football Club is one of the great love stories of sport. From the moment he first set foot in the Anfield dressing room nervously asking for autographs while having a trial at the club, Dalglish felt a passion for Liverpool stir within him. After joining from Celtic in 1977, the supremely gifted striker was embraced by Liverpool fans, for the goals and the glory, and most especially for the three European Cups. The Kop's adoration of King Kenny has never ebbed. Every game, they still sing his name. Liverpool fans have never forgotten how Dalglish held the club together through two tragedies, the first at the Heysel stadium in Brussels in 1985 and then at Hillsborough in 1989. Both disasters are explored at length and in emotional detail by Dalglish in My Liverpool Home. Eventually, for the sake of his health and his family, Dalglish resigned and Liverpool have not won the title since. Although Dalglish walked alone, away from Anfield, in his heart he never really left and has now finally returned, playing a pivotal role in this turbulent period in the club's history. My Liverpool Home is the story of Dalglish's epic love affair with Liverpool, tracing the highs and lows, the characters, the laughter, the triumphs and the many tears. For football fans, this revealing book about one of the game's greatest players is a must. For those fascinated by how a very private man suffered after very publicly supporting his community, Dalglish's emotional story makes compelling reading.
Following the success of Simon Hughes’ Red Machine and Men in White Suits, books which depicted Liverpool FC’s domination during the 1980s and its subsequent fall in the 1990s, Ring of Fire focuses on the 2000s and the primary characters who propelled Liverpool to the forefront of European football once again. With a foreword by Steven Gerrard, this is the third edition in a bestselling series based on revealing interviews with former players, coaches and managers. For Liverpool FC, entry into the 21st century began with modernisation and trophies under manager Gérard Houllier and development was then underpinned by improbable Champions League glory under Rafael Benítez. Yet that is only half of the story. The decade ended with the club being on the verge of administration after the shambolic reign of American owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett. In Ring of Fire, Hughes’ interviewees – including Jamie Carragher, Xabi Alonso and Michael Owen – take you through Melwood’s training ground gates and into the inner sanctum, the Liverpool dressing room. Each person delivers fascinating insights into the minds of the players, coaches and boardroom members as they talk frankly about exhilarating highs and excruciating lows, from winning cups in Cardiff and Istanbul to the political infighting that undermined a succession of managerial reigns. Ring of Fire tells the real stories: those never told before by the key players who lived through it all.
The Golden Age of Probation is the first book on probation by those practitioners who became its leaders. A comprehensive account exploring culture, values and tensions. It looks at the dynamics of probation supervision and political dimensions, including the shift to a market-driven form of public service. A lively and challenging collection of writings by those at the very heart of the Probation Service for 50-years. Complete with descriptions of life at all levels of what has been described as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of criminal justice. Moral and other challenges are presented alongside those of standing-up to government Ministers whose aspirations for ‘political immortality’ have led to profound tensions. The book describes how tough talk and market-strategies have undermined 100-years of devoted public service and ideas about how best to help change the lives of some of the most marginalised people in society. Equality, race and social deprivation are amongst the issues explored as the ethos of probation and its deeply-rooted values are laid bare in a book that deals with highs and lows, hazards, innovation, hopes, aims and the international influence of an organization whose original mission (not always popular) was to ‘advise, assist and befriend’ those otherwise heading for prison and a life of crime. Colourful and highly readable, The Golden Age of Probation takes the reader on a journey through England and Wales exposing social disadvantage, unrest and increasingly London-centric policies. It records first-hand what life was like for those at the sharp end during an era of extensive progress, development and change. From the book 'The price of the semi-privatised probation estate … is that probation has lost its umbilical cord with the courts, the police, the prosecution service and our partners in local authorities. It will be difficult for the courts, in particular, to understand the transforming rehabilitation agenda when services for low and medium risk offenders will be carried out by an origami of commissioned enterprises, whose experience, for the most part, is in the private sector of running prisons, mostly in the USA, and whose staff may not necessarily have the qualifications to properly assess and supervise known offenders.' John Harding CBE, Chapter 10. 'Although the restructure made the service vulnerable to later changes through the 2000 Act, it did achieve better consistency, reduced costs in due course, more women at the top and a national programme of assessment and interventions that was internationally ground-breaking. The mistake in my view was to abandon this direction later that decade, combine with the Prison Service under the banner of offender management and sacrifice the national probation influence that had been gained. Because of the nature of the caseload with most offenders on community orders, we have always had more joint work with police and local authorities than with the Prison Service. Personalities and some bad judgements however got in the way.' Mary Anne McFarlane, Chapter 14. 'For the last three decades, probation just like health and education has been caught up in the dynamics and mechanisms of creating pseudo pseudo-markets to deliver public services. The underlying philosophy might appear to be simply to get the cost of these things off the government's balance sheet but the structures created to do this are not transparent enough for a real assessment to be made of the true financial costs. At the same time organizational targets and protocols have helped stifle initiative and even the capacity to care.' Roger Statham, Chapter 18.
This Atlantic world history centers on the life of Juan Nepomuceno Prieto (c. 1773–c. 1835), a member of the West African Yoruba people enslaved and taken to Havana during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Richly situating Prieto's story within the context of colonial Cuba, Henry B. Lovejoy illuminates the vast process by which thousands of Yoruba speakers were forced into life-and-death struggles in a strange land. In Havana, Prieto and most of the people of the Yoruba diaspora were identified by the colonial authorities as Lucumi. Prieto's evolving identity becomes the fascinating fulcrum of the book. Drafted as an enslaved soldier for Spain, Prieto achieved self-manumission while still in the military. Rising steadily in his dangerous new world, he became the religious leader of Havana's most famous Lucumi cabildo, where he contributed to the development of the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria. Then he was arrested on suspicion of fomenting slave rebellion. Trial testimony shows that he fell ill, but his ultimate fate is unknown. Despite the silences and contradictions that will never be fully resolved, Prieto's life opens a window onto how Africans creatively developed multiple forms of identity and resistance in Cuba and in the Atlantic world more broadly.
