Cold War Football: A History in Ten Matches by Tony Shaw and Alan McDougall (Cambridge University Press, £22)There are several books based on the idea of blending global politics with the beautiful game and this has to be one of the best. Ten football games are historically weighted in writing with flair and exceptional illustrations, as the authors take us from post-second World War to the early 1990s across locations such as Berne, Bucharest, Hamburg and Santiago. Dublin is featured too, when a talented Yugoslavia travelled to play Ireland in a friendly in 1955. Needless to say, the communist, atheist Yugoslavs were giving the yips not to their opponents but to the young Republic dominated by Éamon de Valera and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. Was Yugoslavian leader Tito using the sport to convert Catholics into Marxists? Well, we know the answer. Informative and entertaining.William Kennedy: The Albany Trilogy (Library of America, €38.99)A fitting tribute to one of our finest living writers (William Kennedy is currently working on his latest novel at the age of 98) collecting the first three books of his sprawling Albany cycle. We have a “factional” telling of bootlegger-gangster Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond’s short life, and also Kennedy’s muscular style documenting the era when Irish America oiled the wheels of US society with Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and Ironweed, which was adapted into a film with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. A world of hard-scrabble times: hustlers, gamblers, heavy hooch, broads, coulda-beens, shoulda-beens; even today Kennedy’s dialogue sits like beautifully cut gems. As Colum McCann writes in his splendid introduction: “Kennedy, like all great writers, has been continually scouring the intricate landscape of the human heart . . .”Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s & 60s (Library of America, €44.99)Library of America continues its excellent work in nudging you onto the path of fantastic and, if not forgotten, then certainly overlooked writers with this collection. Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, is a favourite film so I was always curious to read the original source material as featured here in its restored text; film aficionados will also recognise Stephen Frears’s The Grifters, also included. Thompson’s reputation is as one of the hardest hard-boiled writers. It’s certainly raw and rough in his telling of capers, cons, kidnappings, crooks and cops, always anchored with a distinct instinct for storytelling. Like Peckinpah, he experimented with – at times subverted – the genre, which was becoming passé, and breathed new life into it. Get on it, Mac.