Why it’s more than just a game

Simon Barnes, the brilliant writer about sport and nature, would never claim he has had much influence. No, he would say with a journalistic shrug, influence? Me? Of course not: I merely describe, amuse and draw attention to significant events. But his sportswriting, some of it for The Spectator, has been so original and insightful that he has redefined the genre. In doing so, by showing that sportswriting can reveal profound truths about human nature, he has also changed the way many of us look at sport itself.

Appropriately, his new book, The Meaning of Sport, has a dual nature. It is about journalism, what life is like as a newspaper’s chief sports writer, and it is about sport — the essence of the stuff itself. Though the book is completely new, it draws together and elaborates themes that have run through Barnes’s work for the last two decades.