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SHORTLISTED FOR THE SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2024 – CYCLING BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Immensely readable and revealing' The Guardian 'A must read' Phil Liggett, MBE 'A story like no other in cycling' Ned Boulting IMAGINE COMPETING IN THE WORLD'S MOST BRUTAL CYCLE RACES, KNOWING THAT A CRASH COULD BE FATAL Alex Dowsett is one of Britain's greatest cyclists. He has ridden Grand Tours and Classics for elite teams including Sky and Movistar and broke the iconic World Hour Record – the ultimate time trial challenge. With humour, insight and honesty, Alex recounts his years as a pro-cyclist and the challenges he has faced in his struggle to reach the top. Alex has achieved all this despite being the only able-bodied elite sportsperson in the world with haemophilia A. He describes how the condition – in which falls can be fatal – both blighted his young sporting life, and boosted his determination to succeed. Every professional cyclist requires courage, but Alex takes fearlessness to another level in a sport where injury and suffering are a given. With an all-star cycling cast, including Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome, Mark Cavendish and Lance Armstrong, this pulsating book lifts the lid on life in the peloton at the world's top level. From his highs – including Giro d'Italia stage victories – to his frustrations at the injustices he faced in the sport, Alex's memoir perfectly chronicles a career in which he was driven equally by love and rage. Combining Alex's personal triumphs with his unique take on being part of the golden age of British cycling, this is an unmissable tale of sporting endeavour. 'A fascinating insight into the mindset of an elite sportsman who overcame great odds to reach the very top' Simon Brotherton 'The humblest super-talent in the peloton, proving nice guys can win. A wonderful book' Carlton Kirby 'An inspiration for anyone who wants to do whatever they're told they can't.' Michael Hutchinson 'Such an inspiring tale. Poignant and moving, and told with forthright honesty' Peter Cossins
More than three-and-a-half million men served in the British Army during the Second World War, the vast majority of them civilians who had never expected to become soldiers and had little idea what military life, with all its strange rituals, discomforts, and dangers, was going to be like. Alan Allport’s rich and luminous social history examines the experience of the greatest and most terrible war in history from the perspective of these ordinary, extraordinary men, who were plucked from their peacetime families and workplaces and sent to fight for King and Country. Allport chronicles the huge diversity of their wartime trajectories, tracing how soldiers responded to and were shaped by their years with the British Army, and how that army, however reluctantly, had to accommodate itself to them. Touching on issues of class, sex, crime, trauma, and national identity, through a colorful multitude of fresh individual perspectives, the book provides an enlightening, deeply moving perspective on how a generation of very modern-minded young men responded to the challenges of a brutal and disorienting conflict.
Bloody-Minded Pigott is the biography of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Berkeley Pigott, who chalked up more battle experience and hair-raising exploits than most of his contemporaries. Pigott was a young army officer with limited private means so was fortunate to serve in a string of military campaigns from his commission at the outbreak of the Zulu War in 1879 until 1885, when he was promoted to brevet major. He was in the Mounted Infantry in South Africa, Egypt and the Sudan and played a key role in the 1885 Battle of Abu Klea. Though overlooked for a Victoria Cross in 1881, he was awarded a Distinguished Service Order (DSO) Award in 1888 for his service with the Yoni Expedition in Sierra Leone. Pigott also spent six years in India and escaped the tedium of garrison life first by hunting and capturing elephants for the Maharajah of Mysore, then serving as the commandant of Wellington Depot. As one of General Viscount Wolseley’s protégés he was seconded to serve in the 1896 Ashanti Expedition and then as British Resident at Kumasi. Nicknamed ‘bloody-minded’ for disagreeing with the decision of his superior officers, this was a character trait that would ultimately cost Pigott dearly. Bloody Minded Pigott uses previously unpublished material to add fresh detail even to well researched topics such as the 1st Anglo-Boer War and the Nile Expedition and also provides some insight into the role of administrators of fledgling British colonies.
Freedom of speech and expression is considered in the West a high public good and an important social value, underpinned by legislative and ethical norms. Its importance is not shared to the same extent by conservative and devout Muslims, who read Islamic doctrines in ways seemingly incompatible with Western notions of freedom of speech. Since the Salman Rushdie affair in the 1980s there has been growing recognition in the West that its cherished value of free speech and associated freedoms relating to arts, the press and media, literature, academia, critical satire etc. episodically clash with conservative Islamic values that limit this freedom for the sake of holding religious issues sacrosanct. Recent controversies - such as the Danish cartoons, the Charlie Hebdo affair, Quran burnings, and the internet film ‘The Innocence of Muslims’ which have stirred violent reactions in the Muslim world - have made the West aware of the fact that Muslims’ religious sensitivities have to be taken into account in exercising traditional Western freedoms of speech. Featuring experts across a spectrum of fields within Islamic studies, Freedom of Speech and Islam considers Islamic concepts of blasphemy, apostasy and heresy and their applicability in the modern world.
Mental Toughness: The Mindset Behind Sporting Achievement provides a definitive and readable overview which takes the reader to the frontiers of mental toughness research. It is an invaluable resource for sport psychology/science students, lecturers, participants and coaches.
In this classic volume, written at the height of the Cold War, with a new preface of 2006, Peter Viereck, one of the foremost intellectual spokesmen of modern conservatism, examines the differing responses of American and European intellectuals to the twin threats of Nazism and Soviet communism. In so doing, he seeks to formulate a humanistic conservatism with which to counter the danger of totalitarian thought in the areas of politics, ethics, and art.The glory of the intellectuals was the firm moral stance they took against Nazism at a time when appeasement was the preferred path of many politicians; their shame lay in their failure to recognize the brutality of Stalinism to the extent of becoming apologists for or accomplices of its tyranny. In Viereck's view, this failure is rooted in an abandonment of humane values that he sees as a legacy of nineteenth-century romanticism and certain strands of modernist thought and aesthetics.Among his targets are literary obscurantism as personified by Ezra Pound, the academicization of literary culture, the rigidity of adversarial avant-gardism, and the failure of many writers and cultural institutions to conserve the very heritage their political freedom and security depend on. Viereck represents their attitude in a series of satirical dialogues with Gaylord Babbitt, son of Sinclair Lewis' embodiment of conservative philistinism. Babbitt Junior is as unreflective as his father, but the objects of his credulity are the received ideas of liberal progressivism and avant-garde mandarinism. Ultimately, Viereck's critique stands as a timely rebuke to the extremism of both left and right.