Book review: This sporting life: sport and liberty in England, 1760–1960

Robert Colls has always been an outstanding historian, most especially of English working-class life. I should declare a personal bias here, since coming from a County Durham pit village background myself, two of his earlier books, The Collier’s Rant (1977) and The Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield (1987), were seminal in shaping my own thinking about the complexity of working-class identities and encouraging my slowly-emerging interest in social and cultural history. His latest book, This Sporting Life, offers a highly original, personal yet deeply accomplished, history of sporting pastimes and embodiment over the past two centuries or so, and the people of England’s attachment to them. Mike Huggins, Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cumbria, reviews the book 'This sporting life: sport and liberty in England, 1760–1960' by Robert Colls (Oxford University Press, 2020, ISBN 978019808334).