Duncan Hamilton – författare

A biography of Garry Sobers, who turns 90 in 2026 and personifies the greatest of West Indian cricket

At the end of the 1960s, Garry Sobers became the highest profile beneficiary of English cricket''s decision to rid itself of the qualification rule about hiring overseas glamour. He picked Nottinghamshire, a side mediocre for so long that it was stranded on the margins of the Championship. In that first memorable summer Sobers so successfully sparked the revival of a moribund club that it acquired the sobriquet ''Sobers-shire''.

Duncan Hamilton fell in love with cricket because he first fell in love with Sobers. He counts himself as ''blessed'' to have lived only a shilling bus ride from Trent Bridge during the years Sobers played there. The Man Who Walked Out of the Sun is both Hamilton''s remembrance of those times and a study of Sobers'' career, tracking the rise and dominance of the world''s first ''jet age'' cricketer.

The barest of Sobers'' statistics prove that every superlative ever used about his brilliance is justified, but Hamilton considers them less important than the sense of wonder he inspired, the emotion he stirred, the elan with which he played, the abundant beauty in almost everything he did.

George Best is considered the greatest footballer of our time. No other imposed himself so completely on to the romantic imagination. No other was so emblematic of the era during which he flourished. And no other will ever be as memorable as George Best. On the field Best''s skills were sublime and almost other-worldly. Off it, he had a magnetic appeal. He was treated like a pop icon and a pin-up; a fashion-model and a sex-symbol. Every man envied him and every woman adored him. To mark the 50th anniversary of his debut for Manchester United, Duncan Hamilton examines Best''s crowded life and premature death. But most importantly, Hamilton presents Best at his glorious peak - the precocious goals, the labyrinthine runs, the poise and balletic balance and the body swerves. This is George Best: footballing immortal.

Eric Liddell was as close to a saint as any man in modern history has been. Renowned for his athletic prowess, it was also his deeply entrenched values that set him apart from the crowd. These qualities were never better illustrated than in the 1924 Paris Olympics when, having declined his place in the 100 metres owing to the fact that the race was run on a Sunday, he produced an astonishing performance to win gold in the 400 metres, and captured the hearts of the world.Liddell was immortalised in the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire, but that film barely scratched the surface of his life (as well as being economical with the facts). It was China, where he had grown up, that was Liddell''s passion, and his zeal was to improve the lot of its most unfortunate people, in a time of terrible violence and danger, when the country lay under the brutal hand of the invading Japanese army. He was literally on a mission, a force for good in the world.For the Glory takes the reader from Liddell the fastest man on the planet, through Liddell the man with a higher purpose, to Liddell when he had to be stronger than all around him, detained in an internment camp under terrible conditions, when he became the moral centre of an otherwise unbearable world. Liddell would make the ultimate sacrifice, but the story of his life continues to inspire generation after generation, from all walks of life.This is the story of a true hero of our times.

*A MULTIPLE AWARD-WINNING SPORTS WRITER*''Hamilton''s book is a marvel . . . I''m not sure he could write a dull sentence if he tried'' Spectator One of Duncan Hamilton''s favourite writers on cricket, Edmund Blunden, wrote how he felt going to watch a game: ''You arrive early, earlier even than you meant . . . and you feel a little guilty at the thought of the day you propose to give up to sheer luxury''.Following Neville Cardus''s assertion that ''there can be no summer in this land without cricket'', Hamilton plotted the games he would see in 2019 and write down reflectively on some of the cricket that blessed his own sight. It would be captured in the context of the coming season in case subsequent summers and the imminent arrival of The Hundred made that impossible. He would write in the belief that after this season the game might never be quite the same again.He visits Welbeck Colliery Cricket Club to see Nottinghamshire play Hampshire at the tiny ground of Sookholme, gifted to the club by a local philanthropist who takes money on the gate; his village team at Menston in Yorkshire; the county ground at Hove; watches Ben Stokes''s heroics at Headingley, marvels at Jofra Archer''s gift of speed in a Second XI fixture for Sussex against Gloucestershire in front of 74 people and three well-behaved dogs; and realises when he reaches the last afternoon of the final county match of the season at Taunton, ''How blessed I am to have been born here. How I never want to live anywhere else. How much I love cricket.''One Long and Beautiful Summer forms a companion volume to Hamilton''s 2009 classic, A Last English Summer. It is sports writing at its most accomplished and evocative, confirming his reputation as the finest contemporary chronicler of the game.

''One of the best football books I''ve ever read.'' John Motson on Provided You Don''t Kiss Me''Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed by that attitude. I can assure you it''s much more important than that'' - Bill ShanklyWhat Shankly said isn''t even half-true. In fact, it''s bollocks. Football isn''t the be-all and end-all of everything. If nothing else, I know that much.As a player, Thom Callaghan was defined by the winning goal he scored in an FA Cup final. The goal wasn''t the blessing he imagined it would be. His whole career was defined by that brief moment of glory.With his playing days over, Callaghan, still a local hero, is tempted back to his old club as caretaker manager. His task to rescue it from relegation. He''s got the job solely on the recommendation of his former boss and mentor Frank Mallory, now desperately ill and responsible for the team''s precipitous decline.Callaghan is pitched into the Premier League during the last months of the 1996-1997 season, where - among reputations more gilded than his own - he finds himself pitted against the likes of Alex Ferguson''s Manchester United, chasing their fourth title in five years, and also one of the newest recruits to the English game, Arsene Wenger.Can Callaghan save his club from what seems the inevitability of the drop? Does Mallory - eccentric, inspirational and manipulative - even want him to succeed? What if the prize of a personal triumph isn''t worth it in the end?Injury Time is the first novel from the multiple award-winning sportswriter Duncan Hamilton.

A Financial Times Book of the Year 2023A Daily Express Book of the Year 2023''Magnificent, moving, often funny and deeply researched account . . . Is this just a book for those who know football? Far from it: this is a story of glory and the impermanence of fame'' Sunday Times (Book of the Week)''Like Alf Ramsey''s 1966 team, this book has depth, it has riches and it''s a winner - the finest piece of sports writing I have read in ages and a superb piece of contemporary history'' Peter HennessyEngland. 1966. The World Cup.Duncan Hamilton watched England beat West Germany as an eight-year-old boy in the company of his father and grandfather. He recalls ''Wembley, spread out in the sun; the waving flags; the delirious, joy-of-all-joys moment of the final whistle; the trophy sparkling in the late afternoon light''.But, seeing the whole game again during the misery of the first Covid lockdown, finally made him realise what Alf Ramsey and his players had no inkling of, which was what came next for them. How, for many of those boys of summer, almost everything after that shimmering moment amounted to an anti-climax or a setback. How ''66 was not a beginning, a guaranteed path towards more success, but a slow decline and fall, and also a disproportionate number of disappointments. And how the triumph of ''66 was dulled through constant repetition, the same images always flashed before us.Hamilton recognised, too, how many myths and misconceptions had grown around the match.He decided to revisit ''66, tracing the very roots of a story - as well as the hidden figures within it - that really began during the era of post-War austerity.Answered Prayers provides, at last, a full account of English football''s greatest achievement and the failures that followed it. We see the institutional inability to appreciate Ramsey and his players, who were taken for granted; the political machinations of the blazered fools who ran the Football Association; the short-sighted blunderers of the Football League.With his matchless insight and descriptive power, Hamilton tells history afresh and shows us, for the first time, the scale of what was won and what was lost.PRAISE FOR DUNCAN HAMILTON''Hamilton has a perceptively humane understanding of men for whom football was never just a game'' Guardian''A marriage of prose and detail so fine and fastidious that it takes the breath away'' Independent''Justifiably prize-winning'' Mail on Sunday