Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please?: How the British Invented Sport

The acclaimed Sunday Times Sports Book of the Year

Americans may like to think they invented baseball (even if Jane Austen wrote about it decades earlier). And the French might be proud of founding the modern Olympics (when, in fact, a Shropshire doctor beat them to it by forty years).

But it was the British that gave sport to the world.

From the beginnings of 'the beautiful game' - raucous matches of folk football with hundreds of players on each side - to the original bowls - a thin excuse f...