The British invented the Olympics

Is there any chance that you might, at any point in the next three weeks, be talking to anyone? About anything, in any setting, for any length of time? Then you’d better get a copy of The British Olympics by Martin Polley. Because it won’t matter what the primary purpose of your conversation is supposed to be — you will, in addition, be obliged to talk Olympics. Just a given, I’m afraid. Accepting that, you may as well have something interesting to say. And Polley’s book narrates a very interesting story: the one of how Britain invented the modern Games. It’s especially good to have this story up your sleeve during these particular Olympics, marked as they have been by the IOC’s joy-sapping, freedom-of-speech-infringing clampdown on anything that looks vaguely like five circles or uses any of the letters in the word ‘Usain’. Your essential message can be: ‘How dare you come over here, Jacques Sodding Rogge, issuing your absurd litigious edicts to the nation that started the modern Olympic movement, and so without whom you wouldn’t even have a bloody job in the first place?’

Because start it we did.