Immortal

The two time winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award on George Best, considered the greatest footballer of our time.

In putting together Immortal: The Approved Biography of George Best, it must be said that author Duncan Hamilton has done little to redefine the genre. Instead, he has done everything he can with it as it is, he has pushed it, refined it, stretched it, lovingly touched up every corner of it until it is almost as perfect as it can be. In short, Hamilton has essentially won biography writing. […] what makes thisbook so wonderful, [is] the way that Hamilton patiently sets the scene, apparently meandering indulgently through the back stories of incidental characters, but actually drawing the reader deep into the 1960s, imperceptibly marking out the structures of sport, society and celebrity that the shockwave of Best’s arrival obliterated.

[An]evocative account, though that should not come as a surprise. The former newspaperman has become one of sport’s foremost biographers and he is in excellent form here with this account of a footballer who was once his hero.

A marriage of prose and detail so fine and fastidious that it takes the breath away.

This compulsively readable book will not be the last written about Best, but it may prove to be the most illuminating.

What Duncan Hamilton’s impressively researched, definitive new biography, published on the 50th anniversary of Best’s United debut, captures is the artistry of the little Ulsterman.

Diligent, highly readable ... Immortal strips away the myth to show the human Best, Hamilton is a guarantee of quality...

Accomplished ... the attention to detail characteristic of Hamilton's work energises his story.

Hamilton writes sympathetically and insightfully ... he has a smart turn of phrase and an uncanny ability to describe accurately and compellingly what happened during a game.

The author deserves great credit for writing not a sycophantic paean to Best, but an accomplished well-researched account which doesn’t shy away from the footballer’s alcoholism and his propensity to be violent towards women.

Hamilton is a terrific writer ... Immortal is a fine biography and a fascinating portrait of a dawning age of sporting celebrity.

Immortal is undoubtedly the most satisfying life of George Best.

The atmosphere of the Sixties is re-created brilliantly.

Hamilton through the stories and backstories of others broadens his horizons to explain the phenomenon that was Best and the world that destroyed him. Offering up new material and new perspective, Hamilton, as one reviewer would opined, mastered biography.

Duncan Hamilton is the author of Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough which won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for 2007. In 2009, he was awarded the William Hill again, for Harold Larwood, as well as winning the prestigious Wisden Book of the Year for 2009 and Biography of the Year at the 2010 British Sports Book Awards. He lives in the Yorkshire Dales.

The two time winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award on George Best, considered the greatest footballer of our time. 
 
No other imposed himself so completely on to the romantic imagination. No other was so emblematic of the era during which he flourished. And no other will ever be as memorable as George Best. 
 
On the field Best's skills were sublime and almost other-worldly. Off it, he had a magnetic appeal. He was treated like a pop icon and a pin-up; a fashion-model and a sex-symbol. Every man envied him and every woman adored him. 
 
To mark the 50th anniversary of his debut for Manchester United, Duncan Hamilton examines Best's crowded life and premature death. But most importantly, Hamilton presents Best at his glorious peak - the precocious goals, the labyrinthine runs, the poise and balletic balance and the body swerves. 
 
This is George Best: footballing immortal.

The Footballer Who Could Fly

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2013 
 
The story of one man's life told through the prism of his father and grandfather's love of football.

Spellbindingly evocative ... an unforgettable homage not only to his father but to his flat-capped generation of ye grand olde days of thud and mud and Saturday's teatime urban gloaming.

Pitch perfect … This marvellous and affecting book, which is about love and fatherhood and history and manners as much as it is about football … Hamilton is a first-rate pen-portraitist.

Hamilton wrote two of the best sports books of recent years, on Brian Clough and the cricketer Harold Larwood ... a fine collection of vignettes ... make this another winner.

Hamilton takes us on a hugely enjoyable nostalgia trip...a moving depiction of how football can bind together a family.

The book is sincere and deeply honouring of Hamilton’s father as well as dead greats such as Lawton, Shankly, Jackie Milburn, Duncan Edwards and Bobby Moore...

Hamilton brings football home...heart-crackingly nostalgic ... eye-wateringly evocative.

A beautiful, heart-cracking memoir by a sublime writer

'Without football, we were strangers under a shared roof. With it, we were father and son.’ 
 
Inspired by his father’s devotion to Newcastle United and the heroes of yesteryear, Duncan Hamilton brings to life a bygone age telling the story of British football from the hardscrabble 1940s and the ‘never-had-it-so-good’ ’50s right through to the dowdy First Division of the ’70s and ’80s, and today’s slick Premiership. Hamilton recalls some of football’s most sublime players, managers and characters, from Bill Shankly and Jackie Milburn to George Best and Lionel Messi. 
 
But at the heart of The Footballer Who could Fly is Hamilton’s relationship with his own father. Here he tells how football became the only real connection between two people who, apart from their love of the beautiful game, were wholly different from one another.

Duncan Hamilton

For the Glory is wonderful: painstakingly researched, intelligently structured and written with flair. In an Olympic year, it is fitting that an Olympic tale should be the most uplifting.

Daily Telegraph, Sports Books of the Year

Eric Liddell deserves a definitive biography. This is it.

Absorbing... in an age when sport is riddled with corruption, vanity and petty rage, Liddell's story is timely. However, the real theme is faith and providence rather than fame and proving oneself. A story about religious belief could be dry fare, but Liddell is too good a subject and Hamilton too deft a guide to let that happen... He is one of the great sportsmen of the 20th century purely because he knew sport's place.

Eric Liddell's athletic prowess was immortalised in Chariots of Fire. But Duncan Hamilton offers a more detailed and equally engrossing insight into one of Britain's great sporting heroes in this compelling new biography. For the Glory is in turn triumphant, harrowing, moving yet ultimately uplifting. It also cements the status of Hamilton, twice-winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, as the doyen of biographical sports writing.

Duncan Hamilton's compelling biography puts flesh on the legend and paints a vivid picture of not only a great athlete, but also a very special human being.

Superb... Liddell was a saint whose death was the result of following an exemplary life. It is usually an insult to describe a work as hagiography but in Liddell's case there may be no other way to tell his story.

While its descriptions of sporting greatness are worth savouring, For the Glory is most of all an inspiring portrait of a good man. Duncan Hamilton's achievement is to disarm cynics in his measured and memorable account. He brings to life an unparalleled athlete, but more importantly, an inspirational man.

The triumph of Duncan Hamilton's moving, inspiring book is not that it covers brilliantly an exhilarating, unlikely sporting career. It does all this, of course, as Hamilton has fine form, being a double winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. His finer achievement though, is to give a sense of a good man. It is the most sincere of tributes. Hamilton makes Liddell unforgettable for what he did, how he lived and how he loved.

Gripping... an uplifting story of a truly decent man, his athletic prowess and his unwavering faith. Read it.

Hamilton sets out to reveal the man behind the movie (and that indelible song) and he certainly succeeds.

Hamilton shows Liddell as more than a star who used the spotlight to call attention to his beliefs: he was a truly selfless human being who gave everything he had to others... his writing feels effortless in this inspiring story.

Vivid and heartfelt... Hamilton's passion for his subject shows through on every page.

The Life of Eric Liddell

‘Eric Liddell deserves a definitive biography. This is it.’ 
Sunday Times, Books of the Year 
 
Faster. Higher. Stronger. No one has embodied the ideals of the Olympic movement quite like Eric Liddell, star of the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire. After refusing to compete on religious principle in the event in which he was favourite, the 100 metres, at the 1924 Games in Paris, Liddell won an astonishing gold medal in the 400 metres. But instead of pursuing a path of global fame and fortune, he chose to follow his calling as a missionary in the country of his birth, China, a land which then fell under the iron grip of a brutal Japanese army. 
 
Liddell became the inspirational leader of the work camp in which he, like many thousands, was interned, and For the Glory is the full story of his life, of his family, of his fellow prisoners and the terrible hardships and atrocities they experienced in the Far East. This is the tale of a sporting icon, a man of honour and principle who paid the ultimate sacrifice while becoming the moral centre of an otherwise unbearable world.

Duncan Hamilton

Praise for For the Glory

For the Glory is wonderful: painstakingly researched, intelligently structured and written with flair. In an Olympic year, it is fitting that an Olympic tale should be the most uplifting.

Eric Liddell deserves a definitive biography. This is it.

Absorbing... in an age when sport is riddled with corruption, vanity and petty rage, Liddell's story is timely. However, the real theme is faith and providence rather than fame and proving oneself. A story about rel ...

For the Glory is wonderful: painstakingly researched, intelligently structured and written with flair. In an Olympic year, it is fitting that an Olympic tale should be the most uplifting.

Eric Liddell deserves a definitive biography. This is it.

Absorbing... in an age when sport is riddled with corruption, vanity and petty rage, Liddell's story is timely. However, the real theme is faith and providence rather than fame and proving oneself. A story about rel ...

For the Glory is wonderful: painstakingly researched, intelligently structured and written with flair. In an Olympic year, it is fitting that an Olympic tale should be the most uplifting.

Eric Liddell deserves a definitive biography. This is it.

Absorbing... in an age when sport is riddled with corruption, vanity and petty rage, Liddell's story is timely. However, the real theme is faith and providence rather than fame and proving oneself. A story about rel ...

Books by Duncan Hamilton

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