Review of Dennis Brailsford, 'A Taste for Diversions: Sport in Georgian England'. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 1999. Pp 255. with 20 illustrations. ISBN (paper) 0 71882981 6. £15.

Abstract

This pleasingly Printed clean-text volume is concerned with the debt owed by modern sport-in several English-speaking countries as well as to the mother country itself-to the very persistent sports of eighteenth century England before the impact of the Industrial Revolution. The general field has not been neglected so much as ignored in favour of foci on such matters as poachers, inns and crowds. Yet there have been many other very specific sports histories, such as Hylton Cleaver's 'A History of Rowing,' 1957. The present author has been redressing this wider situation with such of his earlier books as: 'Sport and Society': Elizabeth to Anne (1969); 'Bare Knuckles': A Social History of Prize-Fighting (1988); and 'British Sport': A Social History (1992; 1997).