Get Her off the Pitch!, By Lynne Truss

What a great idea to get the effortlessly amusing Lynne Truss to write about sport. She did, however, have two advantages: 1) "The bottomless chasm of my own ignorance" (viewing When We Were Kings, the film of the Rumble in the Jungle, as research for her first boxing match, Truss was surprised to discover that Ali won); 2) Being female, she could ask questions in the football press box like "So what is end-to-end play, then?"

Truss conjectures that the reaction in the literary world to "So who's this AS Byatt then?'" would not be so enlightening. Sadly, her innocence did not work so well among the racing press, who had "the sort of reaction you'd get if you turned up to do a striptease in a mosque". Truss's sports writing is as perceptive as it is funny.