Hamilton's unique insight into a flawed genius

Emmet Malonefinds that if you're a Red Devil you're likely to have a happy time reading during the Christmas holidays.

With a ready market often counting for more than the quality of either the story being told or the ability of the person telling it, it's no surprise that so many of this year's high-profile football books have strong links with Manchester United.

It's nice, though, to see the pick of the crop is a tale simply too good to go untold - that of Brian Clough's 18-year reign as manager of Nottingham Forest.

Clough's career is already well documented, of course, and David Peace's fictional account of his brief spell at Leeds, The Damned United, is probably still the best book about him.

But in Provided You Don't Kiss Me(Fourth Estate, €22.35) Duncan Hamilton tells the story from a fairly unique perspective, that of football correspondent for the local paper.

During the years in question, the relationship would have been important to both men and the closeness that develops between them is readily apparent with Hamilton enjoying a privileged view of the manager's whirlwind success after arriving at the City Ground as well as his long, drawn out and sad decline.

Though Hamilton's most entertaining writing comes very early on as he puts into context the good fortune he enjoyed by landing Clough as the main character in his beat by attempting to portray the lowly grind that made up the bulk of his work, the rest of the book still provides an entertaining and very readable insight into both the personality of one the English game's very best managers and the sport itself during the seventies and eighties.

Money and booze are recurring themes and while the latter flows freely during Clough's dealing with just about everybody, it is the relatively tiny amounts in which the former gets moved about that seems so remarkable by today's standards.

Though considered financially secure because of the pay-off he had received upon being sacked by Leeds, Clough felt the need to supplement his income by flogging a steady stream of fairly low grade ghosted pieces to the newspapers.

Clough ultimately fell out with his colleague and closest friend Peter Taylor because, Hamilton observes, his assistant failed to give him a cut from the earnings on an autobiography marketed almost exclusively on the closeness of their relationship.

Taylor takes the money-grabbing to its ludicrous extreme, demanding free classified ad space from Hamilton because he feels the paper got extracts of his book too cheaply and arranging for the Forest players to train at Scarborough from time to time because he has a flat there and prefers to get new items of furniture there on the team bus rather than pay for a delivery van.

All of this, though, takes place against a backdrop of enormous initial success achieved by two men who formed a partnership that was wonderfully effective while it lasted as Taylor identified the players to be bought and Clough moulded the rather disparate group into a highly effective, and attractive, team.

Hamilton is in the thick of the action on the night the European Cups are won and is still there more than a decade later to chronicle events on the evening when Clough, the drink having long since undermined his ability to do his job, leaves his office behind for the last time with his many possessions in bin liners.

The fact that the first instalment of Bobby Charlton's memoirs, Sir Bobby Charlton(Headline, €18.99) deal only with his time at Manchester United, leaving England to be covered in volume two, is likely to cause less rancour on this side of the Irish sea than it has in the former player's homeland where it has attracted a good deal of criticism.

The book, though, is nicely put together with Charlton sensitive in his recollections of the Munich air disaster and its aftermath and the highly respected sports writer James Lawton deft in his handling of the material.

It's another interesting glimpse of a different era, one where the game's biggest stars were beginning to get a sense of their own worth - a most welcome development that much more recently has gone badly wrong.

The content perhaps reflects Charlton's character a little too well to be compelling, though, and there is little by way of revelation.

Guardian correspondent Danny Taylor's lively account of two seasons in the very modern day Old Trafford life of Alex Ferguson will be of more interest to fans of the current team.

This is the One(Aurum Press, €24.65) is ostensibly based on Ferguson's press conferences during a period that takes in the club's takeover by the Glaziers, the departure of Roy Keane and the success of Jose Mourinho's Chelsea, but Taylor brings the same resourcefulness and humour to this book as he does to his daily work in covering the club with entertaining results.

Norman Whiteside's Determined(Headline, €14.99) is another United period piece and like Charlton's there is plenty in it to catch the eye of those with an interest in the club's history or particular segments of it.

Our George(Gill & Macmillan, €22.99) by Barbara Best is an interesting account of life in a divided Belfast for the great player's family.

The drinking of both George and his mother, prompted in each instance by his stardom, looms large, but there is brighter stuff too including tales of the bizarre fringe benefits of George's endorsement sidelines - hampers of Cookstown bacon products for the family to feast on.

Finally, there is Freestaters(Desert Island, £21.98), Donal Cullen's highly detailed history of the Republic's national team between 1921 and 1939.

Not surprisingly, Cullen suffers a little from the lack of first-hand sources, but there is good stuff here on some of the Irish greats of the time - Kevin O'Flanagan, Jimmy Dunne, Johnny Carey and the like - as well as a painstakingly compiled statistical section.