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FiveBooks Interviews
Currently the Arthur F Thurnau Professor and Karl W Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Markovits was recently the Sir Peter Ustinov Professor at the University of Vienna where he offered two courses on sports identity and culture in the United States and Europe. A child of Hungarian-speaking Jews, Markovits was born in Romania where he was weaned on football, vividly remembering the Hungarian loss to the Germans in the World Cup of 1954 as well as the broadcasts of the Hungarians’ demolition of the English at Wembley and then in Budapest. The tragedy of Munich on 6 February, 1958 rendered him a life-long Manchester United fan. Immigrating to the United States in 1960, Markovits became an avid baseball, basketball, American football and ice-hockey fan. The sports language and culture on both sides of the Atlantic have influenced his entire life.
Hughes has written a column about football for the International Herald Tribune for more than 30 years. He says Argentina is mad. ‘Maradona was a completely crazy choice for coach. This is a guy who has never coached a kindergarten team, and he was put in charge of the best players in his country. And in 18 months, he picked 108 players. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. But I just have a feeling, or perhaps it’s a wish, that now they’ve got there, the players will turn around and say: “We’re going to play our way, and forget who the coach is.” And therefore we’re going to see the Argentines winning every game 4-2.’
Simon Kuper is a Brit of South African origin. He writes a column for the Financial Times on sport and is the author of Football Against the Enemy, Ajax, The Dutch, The War, and Why England Lose. One important aspect of predicting whether a country will do well is population size, Kuper says. England always compares itself to Italy, to France and Germany and to Brazil. But if you look at England coldly from afar, it’s half a mid-sized island. Why do we think England should win the World Cup – it’s ludicrous? They should be about the tenth best team in the world, so, in fact, England slightly outperforms.
Steve Bloomfield has been based in Nairobi since 2006, reporting from 25 countries across Africa. A former Africa correspondent for The Independent, he now writes for a range of publications including Monocle and The Observer and has also written for Newsweek, GQ and Esquire. His book Africa United: How Football Explains Africa (Africa-united.co.uk) is a political and cultural look at 13 African countries through their approach to football.
John Turnbull is based in Atlanta and has been editing The Global Game website since January 2003. He co-edited The Global Game: Writers on Soccer and has blogged for the New York Times ‘Goal’ blog, as well as writing on soccer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, When Saturday Comes (London), So Foot (Paris), Soccer and Society, World Literature Today and Afriche e Orienti. He says sport as play has been lost as an idea in Western capitalist culture. Sport is now competition and sport is consumable.
Writer, comedian and football fan David Baddiel says football writing changed in the 1990s, as men became more openly emotional about the game and about life in general – a sea change epitomised by Paul Gascoigne’s tears at Italia 90 and captured in two iconic British books – Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Pete Davies’s All Played Out. Baddiel and Skinner are doing a series of 2010 World Cup podcasts for Absolute Radio.
Carolyn Steel is an architect, writer, lecturer, and director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects. She has taught at London Metropolitan University, at the London School of Economics where she was inaugural studio director of the Cities programme, and at Cambridge where she ran her own lecture series on Food and the City. Her book, Hungry City, which won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, examines the relationship between food and the city. She talks to FiveBooks about how we can use food to understand who we are and the way we live.
Ivan Day is a celebrated food historian and the author of several books on the history of food. He has worked as a broadcaster, in both television and radio. His collections of antique books and equipment and re-creations of historic table settings have been exhibited at venues including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of London. He is also a talented cook and confectioner with 40 years’ experience in period cookery, and runs courses for the public at Wreay Farm in the Lake District.
In his first book, campaigner, and historian Tristram Stuart looked into the rise of politically motivated vegetarianism in the 18th century. His second, Waste, is an urgent call to action. Nearly one billion people in the world go hungry every day while in North America and Europe, our farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets, and consumers discard between 30 and 50 per cent of our food supplies – enough to feed the world’s hungry more than three times over. As a result, freegans like Stuart are able to live on what is thrown away by our supermarkets. He’ll only stop taking food out of supermarket bins, he’s pledged, when they cease to throw good food away.
Nigel Slater is a cook who writes. He has been food columnist for The Observer for 16 years and is presenter of BBC1’s Simple Suppers. He has just been voted Food Personality of the Year at the BBC Food and Farming Awards. He is the author of eight cookery books, and his latest book is called Tender. Almost a thousand pages and four years in the making, it is published in two volumes. The first – the story of his vegetable patch – has just been published. The second volume is due in 2010.