Events
Shots in the Dark: A Diary of Saturday Dreams and Strange Times - with David Kynaston
Sunday, 29th November 2020, 14:00 - 15:00
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THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED
Brimming with wisdom and humour, David Kynaston's diaries written over one football season offer up his most personal take on social history to date. David Kynaston was seven and a half years old when he attended his first Aldershot match in the early months of 1959. So began a deep attachment to the game and a lifelong loyalty to an obscure, small-town football club.
Though as he sits down to write his diaries almost sixty years on, he reflects that life might have been simpler if his father had never taken him to that first match at the Rec... Shots in the Dark is the diary David Kynaston kept in the football season of 2016/17, detailing the ups and downs of the 'Shots' in the year that saw a divisive referendum in the UK and the impending ascension of Donald Trump. Here Kynaston presents a social history of modern Britain with a difference - all through the prism of the beautiful game.
A testament to the ways in which fandom gives solidity and security to our lives, particularly in these bewildering and rapidly changing times, Shots in the Dark gets to the heart of what it means to be a devoted follower of a sports team. This is a diary of the macro and the micro, as questions of loyalty, of identity, of liberalism and of nationalism all rub uncomfortably up against each other during nine charged months.
David Kynaston was born in Aldershot in 1951. He has been a professional historian since 1973 and has written eighteen books, including The City of London (1994-2001), a widely acclaimed four-volume history, and WG's Birthday Party, an account of the Gentleman v. Players match at Lord's in July 1898. He is the author of Austerity Britain 1945-51 and Family Britain 1951-57 and Modernity Britain 1957-62 the first three titles in a series of books covering the history of post-war Britain (1945-1979) under the collective title 'Tales of a New Jerusalem'. He is currently a visiting professor at Kingston University.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/shots-in-the-dark-a-diary-of-saturday-dreams-and-strange-times-by-david-kynaston-review-brexit-trump-and-supporting-aldershot-fc-p0536k23l (subcribers only)
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