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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.
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.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969. She sought political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992 in order to escape an arranged marriage. She became a member of the Dutch parliament and made a film with Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh that led to his assassination by a Muslim extremist in 2004. She is currently a fellow at the right –wing think tank American Enterprise Institute and head of the AHA Foundation (www.theahafoundation.org), a charity that helps protect and defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam.
Ziauddin Sardar, writer, broadcaster and cultural critic, is considered a pioneering writer on the future of Islam. Author of over 45 books, including his widely acclaimed autobiographies, Desperately Seeking Paradise and Balti Britain. The Future of Muslim Civilisation (1979; 1985) and Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come (1985; 1991) are regarded as seminal, groundbreaking works. He is the editor of Futures, the prestigious monthly journal of policy, planning and futures studies. He talks about the importance of seeing the future as the domain of alternative possibilities, the future of Islam, and the influence of poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, ‘the first Muslim futurist’, on his thought.
David Waddington is Professor of Communication at Sheffield Hallam University. His most recent book, Policing Public Disorder, is a study into the way in which police tactics are likely to affect the amount of order or disorder occurring at protest events and crisis situations. Waddington’s other research interests include contemporary industrial relations and the regeneration of former mining communities. He tells FiveBooks about the nature and implications of the ways in which the police manage political protest and other ‘crowd order’ situations.
Andy McNab joined the infantry in 1976 as a boy soldier. In 1984 he was badged as a member of 22 SAS Regiment. He served in B Squadron 22 SAS for ten years and worked on both covert and overt special operations worldwide, including anti-terrorist and anti-drug operations in the Middle and Far East, South and Central America and Northern Ireland. In the Gulf War, McNab commanded the famous Bravo Two Zero patrol. The patrol infiltrated Iraq in January 1991, but were soon compromised. Three of the eight were killed, four captured, one escaped. McNab was held for six weeks and tortured. Awarded both the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and Military Medal (MM) during his military career, McNab was the British Army’s most highly decorated serving soldier when he left the SAS in February 1993. Andy McNab has written about his experiences in the SAS in two bestselling books, Bravo Two Zero (1993) and Immediate Action (1995). His latest novel War Torn, is just out.
Mary Habeck is Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University and an expert in terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, strategic and security issues and American defence policy. Habeck has held appointments at the National Security Council, served as Associate Professor of History at Yale University, coordinated the Yale Russian Archive Project to facilitate access to documents in the former Soviet archives and is the recipient of the 2001-02 Morse Fellowship. She has a PhD in history from Yale. She has contributed to The Journal of Military History, The International History Review, The Journal of Modern History and others. She says the US contributed to insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan by failing to peel off those with local grievances and treating all insurgents as al Qaeda-linked terrorists.
Dorothy Rowe is a psychologist famous for her groundbreaking and bestselling books on overcoming depression. Her recents subjects include phobias, sibling relationships and structures of belief. In her next book, Why We Lie, she explores the importance and dangers of our fantasies. ‘Interpretations are impressions,’ she says. ‘They are all guesses and theories, and they can easily be invalidated. When you come up against a major invalidation, such as happened to Alan Greenspan when the financial system was threatened with collapse, you simply feel yourself falling apart. Greenspan aged terribly during that period.’