Tales from the Bedroom Floor

London: Yellow Jersey, 2016 Why is this book on the bedroom floor?: I’m somewhat of a collector of football books, but only if they give me some insight into the theoretical aspect of the game; the why rather than the what. And what better way to find out how to win stuff than listen to the Germans? And it was a Christmas present from my Amazon list, if any fans of mine are feeling generous. About the Author: A former law student, Raphael Honigstein moved to London in the early nineteen-nineties. He is the English football correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the German football correspondent for The Guardian and talkSPORT . Most recently, Honigstein has become a major contributor to The Athletic and a regular presence on BT Sport . He is also the author of Englischer Fussball: A German View of Our Beautiful Game . His Twitter handle is @honigstein . Plot: How does a team win a World Cup, particularly if they are paradoxically a perennial favourite but expected to fail? D...

London: Corgi, 2007 Why is this book on the bedroom floor?: From time to time I get a bit of a yearning to read about laddish things and stuff that explodes. I also like reading about British social history, so when I came across this in Banardos’ for 75p I snaffled it, sandwiched between an Iris Murdoch novel and the complete plays of Alan Ayckbourn. About the Author: A publishing director of some reknown, Rowland White is a self-confessed aviation nut and regular author of accessible works on the subject. This book was his first and he’s working on a project about the Space Shuttle as I type, which at least puts him ahead of NASA. Plot: It’s 1982. Argentina’s military junta has invaded the Falkland Islands and South Georgia, and immediately the United Kingdom has hit back by lobbing a task force their way. But in the meantime, a crazy plan involving an obsolete bomber force and an eight thousand mile round-trip is conceived, and if successful will change the balance of ...

London: Omnibus Press, 2001 Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - I’m currently researching a new novel with a background in the music industry, so I’m interested to learn how supergroups of ABBA's calibre reached the top. This book is cheating slightly - technically it belongs to Worcestershire Libraries, but when I came to borrow it, there was a fault because the library has had a new database and this book doesn’t exist on it, having been missed in their scanning exercise. So this is a non-book, in my possession, but like a good ex-librarian, I very much intend to return it. About the Author - Hailing from Sweden, Carl Magnus Palm is one of the world’s foremost ABBA historians, and in addition to acclaimed books about the band, he has been heavily involved with special editions of the band’s reissues and work with the ABBA museum with Stockholm. Although he has written about other artists, his focus seems to be continuing research into ABBA and what he doesn’t kno...