The careers of visual artists boil down to almost nothing – a handful of images imperfectly remembered, and nothing left at all of the moment of their creation. It’s true even of a comparative modern like Robert Capa. Capa’s intense working career was twenty one years long, stretching from his encounter with Trotsky at the…
Author: James Hamilton
Welcome
I am starting this Weblog in August 2023 as a place for “working with the garage door up” – a kind of public notebook about what I’m currently thinking about and working on. The phrase is Andy Matuschak’s and relates to the broader idea of the Digital Garden as discussed by Maggie Appleton. As such…
Book Review: Promised Land: The Reinvention of Leeds United by Anthony Clavane
This review was first published by The Dabbler in October 2011 United’s peaks and troughs over the past fifty years have coincided with the peaks and troughs, not only of the game itself, but also of the city of Leeds and its Jewish community. The Leeds United story is intertwined, in my mind at least,…
War, Football and the Death of the Future
(This post was originally published by The Dabbler in October 2011) My last post about the relationship between the Great War and football generated a debate about the extent to which casualties robbed the game of skills and expertise, and it prompted me to look at FA Cup Final teams from 1900 to 1915 and…
Book Review: All the Materials for a Midnight Feast by Gary Dexter
I think we 40-to-60-somethings are unforgetting this now, the way we grew up with the threat of nuclear annihilation. I can crane my neck around and see myself, aged eleven or twelve, awake under the duvet and contemplating the SS-20 and Pershing Cruise, wondering what it was all for, and wondering why everyone couldn’t just…
Saved By the Internet: The Great Edwardian Media Pioneers
(This post was first published by The Dabbler in October 2011) One of the joys of sports history is that you get to involve yourself in the work of media pioneers: the first men and women to record sound, take colour photographs and make films. And the beauty of doing it now is that over…
Painters, Pioneers and Football: the Story of Burnden Park
(This post was first published by The Dabbler in September 2011) They were built in a 30 year goldrush, the old English football stadia, and when they were new, there’d been nothing like them in the world since Byzantium. Fifty years after London tooled-up in preparation for the great Chartist meeting on Kennington Common, England…
Football’s Real Golden Age?
(This post was first published by The Dabbler in August 2011) I’ve been following football for thirty years – since the days of Ron Greenwood’s England – and one minor consequence of that is that a younger generation now accuse me of having lived through the Golden Age of Real Football, namely, the Seventies. Some…
A Simpler, More Innocent, Happier Time
(This post was first published by The Dabbler in August 2011. I have made minor amendments to the 2011 text) I’ve never had it: the lightly held, easily tossed-off belief that the past was “simpler” or “more innocent.” And little wonder. I spent most of my childhood obscurely but thoroughly scared; even now, many years…
Gary Neville and the Meaning of a Career
(This post was first published by The Dabbler in July 2011 under a different title) Gary Neville’s first England cap coincided with John Major’s “put up or shut up” Rose Garden challenge to his party critics early in the blistering summer of ’95. I was a young man myself then, flatsharing in central London with…