Sport

Byron’s love affair with bare-knuckle boxing was shared by many of his fellow Romantics, who celebrated this most brutal of sports in verse. John Strachan examines an unlikely match.

In 1908 the Olympic movement visited Britain for the first time. Stephen Halliday describes how the British Olympic Association prepared for the Games with barely two years notice.

On February 6th, 1958, the BEA aircraft carrying the players and staff of Manchester United football team crashed shortly after taking off at Munich airport. Richard Cavendish describes the accident.

Richard Cavendish examines the career of all-round sportsman Charles Burgess Fry who died September 7th, 1956.

In March 1966, a few months before the England football team won the World Cup, the Football Association lost the trophy. Martin Atherton tells the full, often farcical, story of the theft and recovery of the Jules Rimet Trophy.

Mike Huggins revisits the early years of British greyhound racing, the smart modern sports craze of interwar Britain.

Mike Huggins investigates the origins of Britain’s morass of sporting rivalries.

Leslie Ray argues that politics and football have always been inseparable in the land of the ‘hand of God’.

Richard Cavendish describes the race in which Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, on May 6th, 1954.

Anthony Cross describes the introduction of British games to Russia.