Harry Pearson – författare

Following his acclaimed book about football in the north-east,THE FAR CORNER, Harry Pearson vowed that his next project would not involve hanging around outdoors on days so cold that itinerant dogs had to be detached from lamp-posts by firemen. It would be about the summer: specifically, about a summer of shows and fairs in the north of England.Encompassing such diverse talents as fell-running, tupperware-boxing and rabbit fancying (literally), and containing many more jokes about goats than is legal in the Isle of Man, Racing Pigs and Giant Marrows is without doubt the only book in existence to explain the design faults of earwigs and expose English farmers'' fondness for transvestism. Warm, wise and very funny, it confirms increasing suspicions that Harry Pearson is really quite good.

Ten years in the making, Dribble! is an A-Z of credulity-twanging facts and stories about what Pele once memorably dubbed ''my bloody job''. It includes definitive explanations of everyday phrases such as ''the magic of the cup'' and ''low centre of gravity''; a complete guide to becoming a terrace character and an in-depth account of how Roy Keane''s pyjamas got him a smack on the nose . . . It also addresses hitherto ignored aspects of the beautiful game, including its longstanding relationship with Country and Western. Johnny Cash dubbed himself ''The Man in Black'' in homage to his idol, referee Arthur Ellis and wrote what is arguably the greatest song ever written about the life of an assistant referee - ''I Walk the Line''.

This is a book about men and war. Not real conflict but war as it has filtered down to generations of boys and men through toys, comics, games and movies. Harry Pearson belongs to the great battalion of British men who grew up playing with toy soldiers - refighting World War II - and then stopped growing up. Inspired by the photos of the gallant pilot uncles that decorated the wall above his father''s model-making table, by Sergeant Hurricane, Action Man and Escape from Colditz, dressed in Clarks'' commando shoes and with the Airfix Army in support, he battled in the fields and on the beaches, in his head and on the sitting-room floor and across his bedroom ceiling. And thirty years later he still is.ACHTUNG SCHWEINEHUND! is a celebration of those glory days, a boy''s own story of the urge to play, to conquer - and to adopt very bad German accents, shouting ''Donner und Blitzen'' at every opportunity. This is a tale of obsession, glue and plastic kits. It is the story of one boy''s imaginary war and where it led him.

A decade and one dog after penning the bestselling Racing Pigs And Giant Marrows, and inspired by the purchase of his new hound, a petit basset-griffon Vendeen called Little Man, Harry Pearson returns to the world of stalking, ferreting and beating with this ramble through the countryside.Harry Pearson was born into a dog-loving family and grew up with a variety of spaniels, terriers, collies and mongrels. He currently spends several hours every day running along behind a bassett-griffon pretending he really intended to go that way himself. Within these pages will be found anecdotes culled from forty-five years of living with dogs, wise observations on canine and human behaviour, historical tales of famous dogs, learned speculations on nature and descriptions of life in the real English countryside - a place where there are otters in the river, glue-sniffers in the woods and fisticuffs over fishing rights.

Slipless in Settle is a sentimental journey around club cricket in the north of England, a world far removed from the clichéd lengthening-shadows-on-the-village-green image of the summer game. This is hardcore cricket played in former pit villages and mill towns. Winner of the 2011 MCC Cricket Book of the Year, it is about the little clubs that have, down the years, produced some of the greatest players Britain has ever seen, and at one time spent a fortune on importing the biggest names in the international game to boost their battle for local supremacy.Slipless in Settle is a warm, affectionate and outrageously funny sporting odyssey in which Andrew Flintoff and Learie Constantine rub shoulders with Asbo-tag-wearing all-rounders, there''s hot-pot pie and mushy peas at the tea bar, two types of mild in the clubhouse, and a batsman is banned for a month for wearing a fireman''s helmet when going out to face Joel Garner . . .

Some men are born medium-paced, some achieve medium-pace, and some have medium-pace thrust upon them.Bowlers who take wickets not with pace or spin, but - at speeds between 65 and 85mph - by nagging accuracy are the commonest in cricket. So far, however, nobody has paid them any attention. Yet seam bowling remains one of cricket''s most mysterious arts. George Hirst, one of the best early exponents of swerve, was as puzzled by it as his opponents. ''Sometimes it works,'' he said, ''and sometimes it doesn''t.''Examining the history of medium-pace bowling, explaining how swing both normal and reverse actually works, and telling the story of some of the great and not-so-great dobbers such as Shackleton (''His bowling, like his hair, never less than immaculate,'' noted Wisden approvingly), Trundlers will bring bread-and-butter bowlers who ''do a bit off the seam'', ''wobble the odd one about'' or simply ''nag away at off-stump'' out into the limelight for the first time. Warm, affectionate and told with Harry Pearson''s trademark humour, Trundlers celebrates dobbers in all their sleeves-rolled-up, uncomplaining workaday glory.

Winner of the MCC Book of the Year AwardHis father was a first-class cricketer, his grandfather was a slave.Born in rural Trinidad in 1901, Learie Constantine was the most dynamic all-round cricketer of his age (1928-1939) when he played Test cricket for the West Indies and club cricket for Nelson. Few who saw Constantine in action would ever forget the experience. As well as the cricketing genius that led to Constantine being described as ''the most original cricketer of his time'', Connie illuminates the world that he grew up in, a place where the memories of slavery were still fresh and where a peculiar, almost obsessive, devotion to ''Englishness'' created a society that was often more British than Britain itself. Harry Pearson looks too at the society Constantine came to in England, which he would embrace as much as it embraced him: the narrow working-class world of the industrial North during a time of grave economic depression. Connie reveals how a flamboyant showman from the West Indies actually dovetailed rather well in a place where local music-hall stars such as George Formby, Frank Randle and Gracie Fields were fêted as heroes, and how Lancashire League cricket fitted into this world of popular entertainment.Connie tells an uplifting story about sport and prejudice, genius and human decency, and the unlikely cultural exchange between two very different places - the tropical island of Trinidad and the cloth-manufacturing towns of northern England - which shared the common language of cricket.