Paper Lion

A continuous feast... The best book ever about football - or anything!

Wall Street Journal

A great book that makes football absolutely fascinating to fan and non-fan alike...a tale to gladden the envious heart of every weekend athlete... Plimpton has endless curiosity, unshakable enthusiasm and nerve, and a deep respect for the world he enters

New York Times

The agility and imaginativeness of his prose transforms his account of this daydream into a classic of sports reporting

New Yorker

Possibly the most arresting and delightful narrative in all of sports literature

Book Week

With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered.

Guardian

The casual, curious, light-hearted precision of his prose is just as impressive as the way a great ball player can make the ball pop off his bat.

Spectator

To suggest they have achieved classic status would be to devalue their still very immediate pleasures. [Plimpton] was a lyrical, precise observational writer, with a keen eye for human absurdity'.

Observer

What drives these books, and has made them so popular, is Plimpton's continuous bond-making with the reader and the comedy inherent in his predicament. He is the Everyman, earnests and frail, wandering in a world of supermen, beset by fears of catastrophic violence and public humiliation, yet gamely facing it all in order to survive and tell the tale. A prodigious linguistic ability is on display throughout, with a defining image often appended at the end of a sentence like a surprise dessert.

Timothy O'Grady, Times Literary Supplement