Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 45: Gazza Agonistes
Autumn 1993
Ian Hamilton’s story of soccer superstar Paul Gascoigne: at play, on show, in the press, in pain, in distress. This is a fan’s account of a player’s life and of a fan’s obsession, of a sports celebrity and of our apparent need to have one. Also in this issue: Jonathan Raban on the flooded Mississippi, Timothy Garton Ash with Erich Honecker.
From this Issue
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Newcastle
Ian Hamilton
‘My first sighting of Paul Gascoigne was in 1987, when he was playing for Newcastle.’
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World Cup Hero
Ian Hamilton
‘The antitheses had been there all along but in July 1990, after Gascoigne’s World Cup triumph, they were given a new formulation.’
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Don’t Cry for Gazza
Ian Hamilton
‘‘Who is Gazza?’ asked Mr Justice Harman in the High Court in September 1990.’
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Actively Portly
Ian Hamilton
‘When Ian Rush was asked to explain his failure to score goals for Juventus he replied that being in Italy was like being in a foreign country.’
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Finally Fit
Ian Hamilton
‘By eight-thirty, the rain was sheeting down, and the thunder and lightning seemed to be directly overhead. The police dogs around the track began to bark. Were lions whelping in the street? Had Gazza been too saucy with the gods?’
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Il Commento Gastrico
Ian Hamilton
‘In the old days, when a British star went to Italy, he disappeared.’
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Portly Again?
Ian Hamilton
‘English football’s most precocious and precious talent is evaporating into the skies over Italy like the fading flares of a half-spent Roman candle.’
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Mississippi Water
Jonathan Raban
‘I flew to Minneapolis, rented a car and followed the river downstream for a thousand miles.’
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Batorsag and Szerelem
Ethan Canin
‘In January of 1973, the year everything changed in our family, my older brother Clive competed for the mathematics championship of William Howard Taft High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio.’
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The Visit
Timothy Garton Ash
‘His language is a little stiff, polit-bureaucratic, but very far from being just ideological gobbledygook. Through it come glimpses of a real political intelligence, a man who knows about power.’
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World War One Veterans
Steve Pyke
Steve Pyke’s portraits of World War One veterans for Granta 45: Gazza Agonistes.
