Simple as that.Derek Robinson writes: Can you learn to referee from a book? Of course not. But when Ed Morrison and I finished Better Rugby Refereeing,
he said: “I wish I’d known all that when I began refereeing!” Me too.
Ed scaled the heights
- he took the Rugby World Cup
final between
Along the way we saw it all:
the good, the bad, and the frankly unbelievable; and we learned a lot.
We learned how to manage the game before it could bite us in
the backside. How to handle the hotspots before they turn into tribal warfare.
How to help the players enjoy the game within the laws, and how to enjoy it alongside them.
Above all, we learned there’s more to refereeing than
knowing the lawbook. “You should referee on a piece of elastic,” Ed says, “not a
piece of string.” No truer word was ever spoken.
The payoff from all that experience is Better Rugby
Refereeing. Our aim is to help referees, at every level, put more into their games and get
more out of them. It isn’t a textbook, it’s a
candid, lively conversation, sometimes
challenging, often funny, in the language that rugby people understand -
straight talk, no guff.
Annoyingly, a lot of commercial booksellers’ websites list the book as if they can sell it to you. They can’t, unless they buy it from us and charge you the mark-up! It’s available only by mail order from our distributor. For full details, click on:
How to
get Better Rugby Refereeing.
I am an author, English, who has cornered the market in flying novels - three about the Royal Flying corps in WW1, three about the RAF in WW2 . Best known is Goshawk Squadron, which would have won the Booker Prize in 1971 if Saul Bellow, one of the judges, had had his way. "The most readable novel of the year," Nina Bawden said in the Daily Telegraph. "I laughed aloud several times, and was in the end reduced to tears."
I'm told these novels reveal a streak
of black humour and a certain debunking of the myths of war, plus what
Paul Scott called "a narrative gift that sets up the hackles of
involvement". The American critic
Paul Fussell commented, "I defy the reader to put the book down once
Robinson has got him into the air."
My
other fiction hits other targets: it includes a trilogy about Luis
Cabrillo, a masterly double-agent and con-artist in WW2 and after,
("He's a heel, bless him." The Observer said), and Kentucky Blues, a
sprawling western in which everyone
- blacks and whites - gets the blues. "A
wonderful novel," said the Daily Telegraph, "full of hilarious and
thought-provoking incident." - and not an aeroplane in sight.
| New novel (Hullo Russia, Goodbye England) seeks publisher. |
Characters
from
previous novels reappear: Skull, the Intelligence Officer, always
getting
sacked for telling the truth; and
Zoe,
no longer a dizzy deb, and more than a handful for Silk. Even Baggy
Bletchley,
last met in A
Good Clean Fight, has a cameo role.
To focus attention, there is the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Silk
surprised himself
(and me) by surviving World War Two with a double DFC. Now Hullo Russia, Goodbye England
finds him preoccupied with lust, distrust, and mutual nuclear
annihilation, in
roughly equal proportions. As
somebody
once said of my
writing: “Disrespect
falls just short of subversion.” HRGE is ready to go. Make me an offer.
…And New
Paperback?
Between
novels of air combat I write stories about Luis
Cabrillo, the best double agent of World War Two. (He really existed,
but not
under that name.) With the war over, he adopts a similar career as a
con
artist. Red Rag Blues finds
him making
big bucks in 1953 in the
Biography
|
Rights
and Opportunities
CopyrightI own all rights - literary, dramatic, cinema, television radio, DVD and the rest - to all my books, with one exception. In 1971 Sam Goldwyn Jr bought the movie rights to Goshawk Squadron. So far, no movie. Make him an offer. Who knows, he might sell. For everything else, make me an offer. I'm definitely interested. Opportunities Book reviewers often remark on the suitability of my books for filming. So far, one has made it to the screen: in 1988 Piece of Cake became a 6-part TV series. Got a big audience, was shown worldwide, now available on DVD. See for yourself, then read the book. I suppose I'm biased, but some of my titles seem to me to be tailormade for the screen. Kramer's War is set on the photogenic island of Jersey, where many German fortifications still survive more or less intact. All the action in A Good Clean Fight takes place in the North African desert (sand is cheap, and a few WW2 Tomahawk fighters still exist). The Eldorado Network is a story of war set in neutral Madrid and Lisbon: no actual battles, but the conflict is endless. Kentucky Blues, "a sprawling, sometimes tragic portrait of a nation being rocked by enormous change", would seem to me to have all the makings of a TV mini-series. And the latest yarn, Red Rag Blues, is a bleakly comic scam in the best Hollywood tradition. There you have it - plot, characters, dialogue all exist. Over to you, whoever you are. Derek Robinson Contact I welcome comments and views about my books, though as a working writer I can't guarantee to have sufficient time to answer everyone. Click here to send me an email. |
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![]() The RAF Quartet (WW2) |
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Major books
and original publication dates: 1971 Goshawk Squadron 1973 Rotten with Honour 1977 Kramer's War 1979 The Eldorado Network 1983 Piece of Cake 1987 War Story 1991 Artillery of Lies 1993 A Good Clean Fight 1999 Hornet's Sting 2002 Damned Good Show 2002 Kentucky Blues 2005 Invasion 1940 2005 Red Rag Blues |