Globalisation is no longer simply the stuff of academic treatises. It has entered the popular lexicon, made headlines and, with workers finding they have little choice but to organise on an international level, it is increasingly the motor transforming trade union practice.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire sold out in its pricey hardback edition within days of being dubbed - by reviewers from across the political spectrum - as [...]

The worst of fans, the best of fans: it is a comment so often made of England supporters, whose reputation for violence and disorder arrives in town well before the team bus. Sadly, this reputation is too often confirmed by the antics of a minority in a city square. There is, however, another, more generous England, celebrated for its passion, humour, knowledge and tradition: same game, same country, but a [...]

Roy Keane famously put the lack of passion in the Old Trafford stands down to an over-indulgence of prawn sandwiches among the corporate hospitality crowd. Or perhaps another explanation is that the Red Army's senses have been dulled by one too many ghosted footballer autobiographies. Decent ones are certainly few and far between, while pitiful efforts are huge in number.

Paolo Di Canio has probably attracted attention because of [...]

Paul Foot has rightly earned the respect of his journalist peers, who recognise in him a dogged investigative persistence. Wit is one of his most effective weapons, and the way in which he uses humour at the expense of pompous power fits in easily with the anti-Establishment ethos of one of the homes for his writing, Private Eye. (Foot's far-left politics were a constant source of send-ups for the original [...]

Football fiction has been a depressingly bare pitch of inspiration. There have been exceptions - the hugely imaginative short-story collections compiled by Simon Kuper and Nicholas Royle, and the engaging efforts of Greg Williams, Charles Higson and Mick Bower - but compared to the heaving shelf of non-fiction accounts of a life lived through football, novelists have largely avoided writing about the beautiful game.

The plot of Jonathan Tulloch's The [...]