On the first page of his absorbing, original, and entertaining account of the place of sport in England between 1760 and 1960, This Sporting Life, Professor Robert Colls writes that one of the aims of his book is to dwell upon what another English academic, Ross McKibbin, meant when he called sport “one of the most powerful of England’s civil cultures.” McKibbin was right, not least because sport cuts across England’s noted—or, to some, notorious—class system in a way that other civil cultures (which find themselves deemed either excessively proletarian or elitist) do not.

That does not mean, as Colls points out, that there are not sports, or aspects of sport, that find themselves rooted in class. For example, it was the landowning, or old upper, class who controlled (and insofar as a version of it still exists, continues to control) foxhunting; the middle class tagged along and often did not pay their subscriptions or other fees; and the working men of a foxhunting district (Colls concentrates on the center of the English sport, Leicestershire, in which happily his university also exists) came too, as foot followers. This is sport as an example of social unification; it is outside the timescale of Colls’s book to dwell on why this particular sport, foxhunting, was banned—up to a point—by the Blair administration in 2003. It had nothing to do with one class’s resentment of another—all those braying toffs on their fine horses, sailing over hedgerows in the English midlands