“... I watched it on my own. When you do that you concentrate harder and it takes more out of you, as Ian Hamilton said: ‘I don’t play football any more, but you should see me watch it.’ Underlying this is the point that a football match isn’t a spectacle but an experience: you don’t look at it, you live through it. This was England’s best performance ...”

“... claimed he’d been impatient for glorious combat only to be thwarted by the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, who ordered him to stay put. It’s more likely that he sought the job precisely because it came with a draft exemption. Gage thinks Hoover’s earliest duties probably involved interrogating captured German seamen and registering German ...”

“... This is the first part of a two-part interview. Part 2: ‘The Price’.Ian Hamilton died of cancer on 27 December 2001, aged 63. It was a death that the ‘LRB’ has especial cause to lament. He was a great support to this paper, helping to get it going in 1979, serving ever since on its editorial board, and above all contributing many exact, unsparing and funny pieces on poetry, on novels – and on football ...”