Reading

Most of the football data books I’ve read are written by at least one part removed. A journalist sitting with the analysts, translating, for example. Ian Graham ran Liverpool’s research department for a decade, so this is the analyst writing it up himself, and it’s much better for that.

The recruitment chapters are the strongest. Graham frames a transfer the way a professional gambler frames a bet: buy when the fee is below what the player will actually contribute, sell when someone offers more than that. Brentford are the worked example, cycling out successful players every summer with no sentimentality about who won them promotion. Ollie Watkins came in for around £2m and left for £28m; one example of dozens.

A number that stuck with me is that of all the €10m-plus transfers into the Premier League between 1992 and 2021, nearly half failed to start even half their new club’s games in the following two years. Graham’s argument is that this is rarely a verdict on the player. The club simply bought the wrong thing then stopped using it.

He’s good on his own failures, too. The Transfer Committee years come across as a long argument in which first-choice targets slipped away and fifth choices arrived to be used grudgingly. A decade of models, and the miss he keeps returning to is Kaoru Mitoma, who rated above Premier League average while playing in Japan and went to Brighton instead.

I’ve read plenty about Nintendo from the outside. This is the rare book from inside: Hobonichi columns and interviews, collected and translated after Iwata’s death. President on the business card, developer in his mind, gamer in his heart, and he plainly ranked those in reverse.

The bits about controllers are my favourites, because it’s the one component where hardware and software have to agree before either is finished. Iwata sets out the Nintendo loop: hardware passes a controller idea to the software teams, who build prototype games with it and report back. The games come out of that accumulation, not from fitting software to a device someone has already signed off, like at other games companies.

I was surprised how stubborn he was about the Wii’s name. “We absolutely need to call this a remote,” on the grounds that the TV remote is the one object in a house anybody will pick up unprompted, and a controller isn’t. The same instinct covers the D-pad, which in the 1980s struck most people as a peculiar thing to be handed.

As a book it’s slight. Aphorisms grouped by theme, the same instincts circling back, and by halfway you can guess the shape of an answer before it arrives. Iwata was president through a stretch when I was paying less attention to games than I had before, or have since, so I don’t carry the memories of him that other people do. I knew his name from the NES days, though, and I know how much he’s missed.

The book has three layers: the 1978 original, a brief 1985 update, and a more substantial 2022 one. The accretion does something historiographical. Each pass lets Leaf revisit his earlier claims, correct what time has disproved, adjust what had previously been legally neutered, and register how public perception of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys has shifted across four decades. You can watch the consensus reorganise itself around the man, edition by edition. For a fully paid-up Brian Wilson acolyte like me, it’s about as comprehensive as the literature gets. Forty-four years is a long time to keep returning to one man. Leaf makes a good case for why it was worth it.

I picked this up expecting another corporate history and got something more affectionate. MacDonald, the Guardian’s games editor, has covered Nintendo for long enough to be in the story herself: there’s a lovely passage about queuing for the Wii at Gamescom 2006, calling her parents from the hall to try to explain it. The book is at its best on the through-line that limitations beget creativity: Koji Kondo writing the Zelda title theme in an all-nighter after the team realised Ravel was still in copyright; the D-pad emerging from the constraints of the Game & Watch; Mario’s mustache existing because pixels couldn’t render a mouth.

The Iwata material is the heart of it. His 2004 line about the industry being on a dead end (“Nintendo is called ‘conservative’ and ‘quiet’ nowadays, so we hope to show our nature as an innovator”) frames everything that followed, from the DS through to the Switch. The hidden tribute to him in the Switch’s OS, accessed by recreating the Nintendo Direct hand gesture on the date of his death, is the kind of detail MacDonald is alert to throughout.

Game development, she notes, has gone from a band to an orchestra. So has the writing about it.

Arnold-Foster offers a cultural history that traces nostalgia’s journey from a fatal medical diagnosis (a homesickness severe enough to kill C17th Swiss mercenaries) to the soft, wistful feeling we recognise today. She is compelling on nostalgia’s medical past, but earns contemporary relevance by showing how the emotion was gradually weaponised by advertisers, politicians and an industry happy to sell the feeling back to us. She’s admirably even-handed on its political use: the left have our own sentimental golden ages (the heydays of the NHS and BBC) as well as its recent association with the dreaded MAGA and Brexit. Her argument that nostalgia is rooted in selective, reconstructive memory gives the book genuine rigour. Occasionally the sweep outruns the depth, but as an introductory history of a feeling that quietly shapes how we vote, buy and remember, it’s illuminating.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​