Roy of the reader: swapping novels with my friend Roy Hodgson

The last time I met Roy Hodgson, at Le Café Anglais, Rowley Leigh’s restaurant in Bayswater, I drew a king from the pack. I presented Roy — the West Bromwich Albion and now England manager — with Colm Tóibín’s wonderful novel The Master. Roy smiled as he laid down an ace: ‘Is this the one about Henry James? I’m afraid I’ve read it.’

Make that one-all. At a previous lunch I had given him Stefan Zweig’s masterpiece, Beware of Pity, a novel so close to my Habsburg heart that I wanted him to love it, too. It is the sort of book that defines character, never mind literary taste. ‘Magnificent,’ he told me a few weeks later.

These are not the kind of remarks one would expect from a traditional football man, at least not in this country, where players and managers have so little interest in the wider world. There is in football an oikishness, either natural or cultivated, which suits the participants.