Bottle

"This book is by my brother and is a parody of the hooligan’s memoir, which, as you probably don’t know, is a genre and there is a quite a big market for hooligans’ memoirs. Yes. John King wrote The Football Factory , which is a novel out of this genre, the ins and outs of gang warfare and the heady days of the Chelsea Headhunters. They had this image of themselves as soldiers in a war – ‘We’re going to take the west stand’ kind of thing. But these books are always just about how hard the author is – here are my glory days when I broke bottles on people’s faces. On Amazon there are people who haven’t realised my brother’s book is a parody and they’ve read it and written things like: ‘This bloke isn’t hard at all!’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The real ones are all called things like Naughty: The Story of a Football Hooligan Gang . Hang on, I’m just having a look through them now. 30 Years of Hurt: A History of England’s Hooligan Army . Do you know where that comes from – 30 Years of Hurt ?"