Among the Thugs

For eight years - the years of riots on Channel ferries, street-fighting outside Britain's football grounds, and the Heysel and Hillsborough disasters - Bill Buford, an American, travelled with football hooligans up and down Britain, and to Italy, Turkey, Greece and Germany. He attended a National Front disco and witnessed the robbing of a pub. He saw stabbings and scenes of extreme violence - in one instance, violence that was stopped only when the army sent in a tank. He met people with names like Bone Head, Paraffin Pete and Steamin' Sammy, and befriended others - many of them now in jail - who were pickpockets, safe-crackers, cocaine dealers, traders in moody counterfeit money, and one who bit out the eye of a policeman.