Search results for ""Author John Leonard""

Flight to Bogota tells the incredible story of one of the most infamous episodes in English sporting history, when a group of British footballers turned their backs on club and country before the 1950 World Cup for a sporting El Dorado in Colombia. It was a rebellion led by first-choice England centre-half Neil Franklin. The book charts how the players were secretly lured away from Britain, amid Franklin's strident complaints of 'serfdom' in English football, their brief struggles to adapt to Colombian life and the fallout once they humiliatingly returned home to face the wrath of club and country. This escapade was a personal failure for Franklin and left his career in tatters. But the players' vociferous defence of their behaviour enlightened a shocked nation about how clubs mistreated footballers. Ultimately, it led to reforms that would financially benefit future footballing generations, but hopes of vast riches proved nothing more than an illusion for Franklin and his fellow 'football bandits' as they embarked on their 'Flight to Bogota'.

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In The Value of Milton, leading critic John Leonard explores the writings of John Milton from his early poetry to his major prose. Milton's work includes one of the most difficult and challenging texts in the English literary canon, yet he remains impressively popular with general readers. Leonard demonstrates why Milton has enduring value for our own time, both as a defender of political liberty and as a poet of sublimity and terror who also exhibits moments of genuine humanity and compassion. A poet divided against himself, Milton offers different rewards to different readers. The Value of Milton examines not only the significance of his most celebrated verse but also the function of biblical allegory, classical culture, and the moods, voice and language that give Milton's writings their perennial appeal.

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Waddington, Director of a Working Man's Ballet is a biography of the former Stoke City manager, Tony Waddington, one of the most underrated figures in 60s and 70s football. It charts how a man with the appearance of an urbane bank manager belied the stereotype of the hard-nosed football manager as he turned around the fortunes of an ailing club on the brink of going out of business. Instead, Waddington led the Potters to promotion, secured the club's first major trophy and challenged for a league title in a season bedevilled by bad luck, before a financial calamity led to his departure. An advocate of free-flowing football, yet fielding some of the most uncompromising defensive players of his era, he reinvigorated old pros, inspired young players and won the adulation of a generation of fans. Tony Waddington, or 'Waddo' as he was affectionately known to fans and players alike, achieved all this as the director of what he fondly termed 'a working man's ballet'.

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One sporting image stands out as the most divisive and controversial in English football history: the sight of the England team making the Nazi salute in Berlin on 14 May 1938. This book examines how and why England''s footballers made a gesture that would haunt them for the rest of their days.To Hitler, England''s Nazi salute in the Olympic Stadium, Berlin, was a political victory. For the British government, it was passed off as a mere act of sporting courtesy.Salute explores botched British diplomacy, using sport as propaganda during the 1930s while pretending to do the opposite. Fascist dictators worked as overt and clinical propagandists. The book charts the political flashpoints of the 1930s, as English football established international relations with the fascist states of Italy and Germany. But it includes a tale of redemption: how one of the England players making the Nazi salute then rescued one of the fans watching him, a teenage German-Jewish

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Instead of making a scapegoat of television as the cause of crime on the streets of the USA, stupidity in its schools, and spectacle rather than substance in its government, this challenge to conventional ideas about television sees inside the box an echo chamber and a feedback loop; a medium neither wholly innocent of, nor entirely responsible for, the disorder it brings to people's homes. Taking on a diverse range of topics from children's shows to cable, from the cheap thrills of action adventures to the solemn boredom of pledge drives, the author argues for a whole new way of thinking about television.

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A marriage of politics and literature which transcends the daily headlines to get at America's view of itself in history. The essays range from the American fear and loathing of the 1960s to Nixon's secret love affair with Elvis.

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John Milton was a master of almost every type of verse, from the classical to the religious and from the lyrical to the epic. His early poems include the devotional 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity', 'Comus', a masque, and the pastoral elegy 'Lycidas'. After Cromwell's death and the dashing of Milton's political hopes, he began composing Paradise Lost, which reflects his profound understanding of politics and power. Written when Milton was at the height of his abilities, this great masterpiece fuses the Christian with the classical in its description of the fall of Man. In Samson Agonistes, Milton's last work, the poet draws a parallel with his own life in the hero's struggle to renew his faith in God.

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'An endless moral maze, introducing literature's first Romantic, Satan' John CareyIn his epic poem Paradise Lost Milton conjured up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties - blind, bitter and briefly in danger of execution - Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence has led to intense debate about whether it manages to 'justify the ways of God to men' or exposes the cruelty of authority.Edited with an introduction and notes by JOHN LEONARD

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