Contemporary Authors

• Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession - 2016 Atria Books, New York, NY
• Authentik / Gourmet London - 2007 Globe Pequot Press, Guilford, CT

• Spectator - http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/06/roger-federer-helped-me-through-my-nervous-breakdown-says-william-skidelsky/

  Roger Federer helped me through my nervous breakdown, says William Skidelsky
  But why has such a boringly perfect tennis player inspired so many writers, wonders Edmund Gordon (worried by his own fascination with Andy Murray)
  Edmund Gordon

  13 June 2015 9:00 AM
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  Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession
  William Skidelsky
  Yellow Jersey, pp.276, £16.99
  Good writing about sport is rare — and good writing about tennis is that much rarer — so it’s conspicuous that we’ve had so much of it about Roger Federer. The gold standard was set in 2006 with David Foster Wallace’s remarkable essay ‘Federer as Religious Experience’, in which the great novelist provided a dazzling analysis of the great player’s game. Then came Jon Wertheim’s Strokes of Genius (2010), an elegant account of the 2008 Wimbledon final between Federer and Nadal. In a letter published in Here and Now (2013), the correspondence between Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee, the latter contributed an uncharacteristically lyrical bit of praise for the Swiss. Now William Skidelsky, former literary editor of the Observer and New Statesman, has produced Federer and Me, an enjoyable, quirky memoir of his life as an obsessive Fedhead.

  It’s a surprising bias for so many writers to share (at least, it surprises me: I might as well declare my own bias towards Andy Murray at this point). As Skidelsky observes, ‘Tennis is an unusually — perhaps uniquely — psychological sport.’ Part of the fun of watching it, let alone reading or writing about it, lies in seeing how the players make out against themselves. So I can’t help feeling that Federer — with his ‘curiously expressionless demeanour’, his supremely untroubled psyche, and his nigh-on flawless game — is uniquely unexciting. Supporting him would seem to involve nothing more psychologically onerous than forgiving the odd sartorial absurdity (the monogrammed military uniform he wore to Wimbledon in 2009) or immodest comment (his description of winning Wimbledon in 2012 as ‘familiar’). It’s mainly just a case of basking in his radiant perfection.

  Skidelsky more or less confirms this view. He describes the Swiss maestro’s game as ‘unearthly, stupendous, possessed of a magnificence I’d never before seen on a tennis court’. A decent player himself, the realisation that his talents are microscopic by comparison to Federer’s doesn’t leave him feeling crushed, but with ‘a sense of gratitude, of joyousness, merely to have witnessed such skill, to know that it was possible’. Even when Federer loses, Skidelsky doesn’t feel that flaws in his hero’s game or character have been revealed: he feels as though ‘some fundamental wrong, some injustice, has been perpetrated’.

  Just as heartbreak is usually more interesting to read about than romantic bliss, Skidelsky’s idolatry would soon become cloying if that were all his book contained. But what sets Federer and Me apart from most other sports books is the attention it pays to the psychological roots of his obsession. He grew up in an intellectually imposing family (his father is the biographer and historian Robert Skidelsky; his brother is the philosopher Edward Skidelsky), and throughout his childhood he was patronisingly regarded as ‘the sporty one’. When he went to Eton, he started to feel ashamed of this identity: the school ‘was a territory indelibly associated in my mind with beings like my father and brother. It wasn’t a place for me.’ He shut sport — and tennis in particular — out of his life, and poured his energies into academic work instead.

  This was enough to get him into Oxford, but in his second year he had a breakdown and, buoyed up on antidepressants, he took his finals a year late. After graduating, he began seeing a psychotherapist, which helped. It was during this period that his obsession with Federer started. ‘I was coming to understand myself, and my past, in a new way,’ he writes. ‘I was trying to reconcile the divisions within me that had led me to have no real idea who I was — sporty or intellectual, a thinking person or a feeling one.’ Federer appeared to reconcile these tensions: ‘There was a corollary, I felt, between what Federer had achieved in the context of tennis and what I needed to bring about within myself.’

  Federer and Me is a brave book, both in terms of its form (cramming large passages of memoir into a book marketed at tennis nerds) and in content (revealing a multitude of highly personal details). It is also an engaging one, frequently funny —as when Skidelsky rails for several pages against Nadal’s obsession with his ‘gluteus maximus’ — and ultimately poignant. But it has left me with one nagging question: if an uncertain sense of personal identity can lead a man to revere Federer, what kind of buried masochism underwrites an infatuation with Andy Murray?

  Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £14.99 Tel: 08430 600033

• Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/profile/williamskidelsky

  William Skidelsky
  William Skidelsky is an author who writes for the Observer. He was books editor of the Observer until 2012. Previously, he was deputy editor of Prospect magazine and literary editor and food columnist for the New Statesman. He is the author of Gourmet London (Authentik)

A fan's love affair with Roger Federer
Michael Mewshaw
Washingtonpost.com. (May 6, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Washington Post
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Byline: Michael Mewshaw

Professional tennis might best be compared to a butterfly. Viewed from a flattering angle, the game boasts gossamer wings, balletic movement and the complex geometry of a Mondrian painting. Seen from the other side, it reveals an ugly, squirming bug beneath its surface beauty. Recent allegations of betting and match-fixing involving players, umpires and organized crime, along with charges of doping against Maria Sharapova, suggest that the sport isn't always what fans like to believe, and the stars often stand at a dramatic parallax to the images purveyed by PR agents. The difficulty for anybody writing about tennis is to strike a balance between admiration for the athleticism on display and acknowledgement of realities that are kept carefully concealed from the public.

William Skidelsky follows in the tradition of the sport's lyric poets, and sticking to that perspective, his book, "Federer and Me," is a passionate valentine in praise of the Swiss winner of a record 17 Grand Slam titles. Skidelsky makes no pretense of even-handedness and proclaims his loathing for Roger Federer's nemesis, Rafael Nadal, whose victory over Federer in the 2008 Wimbledon final left the author "close to meltdown; I remember at one point writhing around on the floor."

In his unalloyed affection for Federer, Skidelsky finds himself in lofty literary company. David Foster Wallace first plowed this ground with his frequently anthologized essay "Federer as Religious Experience." Like Wallace, who dismissed Nadal as "a mesomorphic and totally martial" robot, Skidelsky rationalizes Federer's losing record against Nadal while revering his fetishized favorite as a figure "of legend, almost a god." According to the bible of Skidelsky, this deity consists of a trinity of "contradictory archetypes: Federer the saint, the modern husband, and the artistic genius." If this sounds slightly over the top, it's nevertheless of a piece with what Skidelsky admits: There is "something unfathomable about the whole business of being a fan ... in its self-evident irrationality."

On paper -- where Skidelsky appears to spend the bulk of his life outside tennis -- he seems to be an improbable candidate for membership in the "Fed-heads" who follow their man with a blind fervor more often associated with religious or political ecstasy. Yet while Skidelsky's rA[c]sumA[c] shows him to be a former literary editor at the Observer and the New Statesman, a graduate of Eton and Oxford, and a good club-level player, he confesses that he has suffered from depression, "a protracted identity crisis" and the stress of living up to family expectations. (His father and brother are renowned British academics who have co-authored a treatise on economics.) With the help of medication and psychotherapy, Skidelsky regained much of his equilibrium, but he suggests that the recovery wasn't complete until he became a late convert to Federer and found in him "a point of constancy, of stability."

This has not only led him to spend long hours watching the Swiss ace's televised matches. He has traveled to tournaments as distant as Germany, spent thousands of dollars buying tickets from scalpers and camped out overnight to buy a ticket to a Wimbledon final. This faith in his hero's healing powers reached its apotheosis when Skidelsky's wife, then his girlfriend, had a therapeutic abortion for an unviable fetus, and several days later he invited her to a Federer match to ease the tension. As he concedes, "I think by this point she despairingly felt that if she couldn't beat me, she might as well join me."

This raises questions about whether the author's devotion to Federer has actually made him "a happy, freer adult." Is it evidence, instead, of an obsessive-compulsive disorder -- not unlike Nadal's picking at the seat of his pants, which, along with his other OCD behavior, Skidelsky finds neurotic? Belatedly, the author acknowledges that he's a recidivist. He had earlier long-distance attachments to athletes -- one to a soccer player, another to a snooker star. No word on what his analyst made of this.

To be fair, Skidelsky does a better job of analyzing Federer's game than explaining his own psyche. He situates the Swiss in historical context, describing him as simultaneously a throwback to traditional tennis and an avatar of modern technology and training. Skidelsky is especially informative on the switch from wooden to composite rackets and the advent of synthetic strings, which permit a player to hit with more topspin and thus more power and control. He'll certainly get no argument from the Fed-heads when he observes that the contemporary game of relentless baseline retrieving is boring compared with their man's graceful, instinctive construction of points. But personally, this reviewer draws the line when Skidelsky quotes Elizabeth Wilson in her history of tennis, "Love Game," as saying that "tennis is a uniquely erotic game ... with its guarantee of regular 'climaxes and anti-climaxes.'" The same might be said of stock-car racing.

Confessions of a Fedhead
Edmund Gordon
Spectator. 328.9746 (June 13, 2015): p37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession

by William Skidelsky

Yellow Jersey, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 276, ISBN 9780224092357

Spectator Bookshop, 14.99 [pounds sterling]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Good writing about sport is rare--and good writing about tennis is that much rarer--so it's conspicuous that we've had so much of it about Roger Federer. The gold standard was set in 2006 with David Foster Wallace's remarkable essay 'Federer as Religious Experience', in which the great novelist provided a dazzling analysis of the great player's game. Then came Jon Wertheim's Strokes of Genius (2010), an elegant account of the 2008 Wimbledon final between Federer and Nadal. In a letter published in Here and Now (2013), the correspondence between Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee, the latter contributed an uncharacteristically lyrical bit of praise for the Swiss. Now William Skidelsky, former literary editor of the Observer and New Statesman, has produced Federer and Me, an enjoyable, quirky memoir of his life as an obsessive Fedhead.

It's a surprising bias for so many writers to share (at least, it surprises me: I might as well declare my own bias towards Andy Murray at this point). As Skidelsky observes, 'Tennis is an unusually--perhaps uniquely--psychological sport.' Part of the fun of watching it, let alone reading or writing about it, lies in seeing how the players make out against themselves. So I can't help feeling that Federer--with his 'curiously expressionless demeanour', his supremely untroubled psyche, and his nigh-on flawless game--is uniquely unexciting. Supporting him would seem to involve nothing more psychologically onerous than forgiving the odd sartorial absurdity (the monogrammed military uniform he wore to Wimbledon in 2009) or immodest comment (his description of winning Wimbledon in 2012 as 'familiar'). It's mainly just a case of basking in his radiant perfection.

Skidelsky more or less confirms this view. He describes the Swiss maestro's game as 'unearthly, stupendous, possessed of a magnificence I'd never before seen on a tennis court'. A decent player himself, the realisation that his talents are microscopic by comparison to Federer's doesn't leave him feeling crushed, but with 'a sense of gratitude, of joyousness, merely to have witnessed such skill, to know that it was possible'. Even when Federer loses, Skidelsky doesn't feel that flaws in his hero's game or character have been revealed: he feels as though 'some fundamental wrong, some injustice, has been perpetrated'.

Just as heartbreak is usually more interesting to read about than romantic bliss, Skidelsky's idolatry would soon become cloying if that were all his book contained. But what sets Federer and Me apart from most other sports books is the attention it pays to the psychological roots of his obsession. He grew up in an intellectually imposing family (his father is the biographer and historian Robert Skidelsky; his brother is the philosopher Edward Skidelsky), and throughout his childhood he was patronisingly regarded as 'the sporty one'. When he went to Eton, he started to feel ashamed of this identity: the school 'was a territory indelibly associated in my mind with beings like my father and brother. It wasn't a place for me.' He shut sport--and tennis in particular --out of his life, and poured his energies into academic work instead.

This was enough to get him into Oxford, but in his second year he had a breakdown and, buoyed up on antidepressants, he took his finals a year late. After graduating, he began seeing a psychotherapist, which helped. It was during this period that his obsession with Federer started. 'I was coming to understand myself, and my past, in a new way,' he writes. 'I was trying to reconcile the divisions within me that had led me to have no real idea who I was--sporty or intellectual, a thinking person or a feeling one.' Federer appeared to reconcile these tensions: 'There was a corollary, I felt, between what Federer had achieved in the context of tennis and what I needed to bring about within myself.'

Federer and Me is a brave book, both in terms of its form (cramming large passages of memoir into a book marketed at tennis nerds) and in content (revealing a multitude of highly personal details). It is also an engaging one, frequently funny--as when Skidelsky rails for several pages against Nadal's obsession with his 'gluteus maximus'--and ultimately poignant. But it has left me with one nagging question: if an uncertain sense of personal identity can lead a man to revere Federer, what kind of buried masochism underwrites an infatuation with Andy Murray?

Gordon, Edmund

Beauty and the beast
Simon Kuper
New Statesman. 144.5268 (June 26, 2015): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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Federer and Me: a Story of Obsession

William Skidelsky

Yellow Jersey Press, 280pp, 16.99 [pounds sterling]

William Skidelsky was desperate to watch Roger Federer in the fourth round of last year's Wimbledon, so he bought a tent and camped out overnight to get tickets. Happily, he went alone: "There's only one thing worse than camping, and that's camping with other people." Still, he had to spend the night in a field with hundreds of other tennis obsessives, packed together so closely that: "We were all basically going to sleep with one another."

Skidelsky has put his obsession to productive use. This very enjoyable biographycum-autobiography illuminates not just Federer's place in tennis history but also the way in which the author converted his psychological problems into sporting fandom.

As a child, Skidelsky was gifted at sports. Until he was about 11, tennis "was--by some distance--the most important thing in my life". But his family didn't particularly value sport. Skidelsky's father is the historian Robert, a biographer of John Maynard Keynes. "It felt like there was a pressure, emanating from my father, to display copious brainpower--to be 'intellectual' - at all times," writes the son. Within the family, William's elder brother got defined as the "intellectual" and William as the "sporty one". Sportiness felt to him like a "badge of inferiority" and in his early teens he abandoned tennis.

Eton plays a dastardly role here. Skidelsky had attended state school, until, like his brother, he won "a special scholarship, whose purpose was to admit, each year, a small number of state-educated 16-year-olds into [Eton's] sixth form". That this supposedly equalising award went to the sons of a history professor (now a peer) reveals a lot about British egalitarianism, even leaving aside Skidelsky's brother's "three years at a private London day school".

The point is that Skidelsky arrived at Eton under the bizarre impression that it was a rarefied intellectual environment. He later took that attitude with him to Oxford, still aspiring to be an intellectual, rather than the "sporty one".

Along this path, he became depressed. Eventually, he entered psychoanalysis--as Nick Hornby does in his seminal book on sporting fandom, Fever Pitch, which Federer and Me often echoes. Psychoanalysis isn't very good at "curing" people. However, it's an almost indispensable tool for memoir writing. It has given Skidelsky the insight into himself to explain his obsession with Federer.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

What attracted him wasn't Federer the person but Federer the aesthete. "Roger Federer," he writes, "made tennis beautiful again." In perhaps the most masterful section of the book, Skidelsky analyses why that is. In the new era of big, graphite rackets, tennis had morphed into a "power baseline game"--players blasted topspin rockets at each other from the baseline. Net play died out. Almost all players used the same strokes: a two-handed backhand and a crooked-armed slap on the forehand. Power and effort displaced brain and beauty. Every player became Ivan Lendl.

Grace seemed lost for ever--until Federer came along. He, too, usually hits topspin rockets from the baseline but he does so with a one-handed backhand and a forehand of almost infinite variety. He can change the angles of his torso, elbow and wrist to hit forehands "to pretty much any part of the court, with every conceivable variation of height, spin and power; and he can do this from almost any position", writes Skidelsky.

Federer, to him, is "pre-modern" and "backward-facing"--and yet the Swiss "manages to seem contemporary, too". Just how contemporary Skidelsky realises only when he watches him in one match, almost from court-side. Up close, the impression that Federer gives of silent, sweat-free, effortless, country-house elegance evaporates. Suddenly Skidelsky sees how fast, powerful, hard-working and "almost feral" he is. The author quotes the late American novelist David Foster Wallace, another excellent tennis critic: Federer is both "Mozart and Metallica".

Skidelsky began to follow Federer obsessively only in 2006, just as his reign as uncontestably the best player on earth was ending. The Mallorcan muscleman Rafael Nadal--the exemplar of the power baseline game--had arrived.

Nadal is the comic villain of this book. Skidelsky calls him "a bunglesome messenger from a future-gone-wrong, an embodiment of every crudifying technological development of the previous four decades, a player who, with one 4,000 rpm smote of his racket, could smash all Federer's artistry, his subtlety, to pieces. Nadal, one could say, was the price tennis had to pay for Federer's genius."

To Skidelsky, Federer in the Nadal years has been a "failure". That is a harsh verdict on a man who has won a record 17 Grand Slam singles tournaments. But, as the author points out, the point of Federer was never to amass trophies. It was to achieve undying greatness: "What was possible for Federer at one point seemed limitless." To support him after the coming of Nadal is to experience a yearning for a lost idyll--a "golden era" summed up in the tennis commentators' cliche "the old Federer". The nostalgia currently feels overwhelming. The Swiss player is 33 and the coming Wimbledon might just be his last.

Among the achievements that Federer can look back on is reconciling Skidelsky the adult with Skidelsky the tennis-loving kid. "Thanks to him," writes the author, "I have sometimes felt as if I've been able to live my life over, to make sense of all that went wrong, and, as a result, to be a happier, freer adult." Perhaps it's because Federer turned sport from a grubby, corporeal pursuit into something that belongs to the higher realm esteemed by Skidelsky's dad, Robert. The book ends with Skidelsky cured of depression, now a loving father, husband and tennis player.

This feels too neat. Certainly Skidelsky doesn't probe himself as honestly and painfully as Hornby did. There is also a contradiction between the helpless, obsessive fan depicted here and the clear-sighted writer who depicts him. Mostly the story of obsession rings true but sometimes there is the suspicion that it has been touched up for the sake of a good book.

And this is a good book. Skidelsky has a feel for words, for the length of sentences, and for tennis. The "sporty one" has finally proved himself in a field his father can respect: as a writer.

Kuper, Simon

Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession
Publishers Weekly. 263.14 (Apr. 4, 2016): p77.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession

William Skidelsky. Atria, $34 (272p)

ISBN 978-1-5011-3393-0

Skidelsky, formerly literary editor of the Observer and the New Statesman, wants to be the chief Fed-head, the most loyal fan of Roger Federer, whom he considers to be the greatest tennis player of all time. In this slightly frantic memoir and love letter to Federer, the British writer says he first fell in love with tennis as a child, with his father later joining him to play doubles at a local club. Skidelsky manages to toss in a few personal details about his family, love life, bouts of depression at college, and therapy sessions, but mostly he writes confidently of Federer the man and myth: his peak years of 2004 to 2006; his rivalry with Rafael Nadal in 20082009; his 2009 Australian win; his 2011 comeback; and his 2014 Wimbledon resurgence. In one revealing section, the often hilarious Skidelsky tries to decipher the difference between being a super fan and being completely obsessed. With his careful attention to the evolving talent of Federer and the debates around surface, rackets, strategy matches, and celebrity, Skidelsky scores. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Assoc. (May)

Mewshaw, Michael. "A fan's love affair with Roger Federer." Washingtonpost.com, 6 May 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA451624813&it=r&asid=2d9724f9d5d7845fc390e7868e5d5b79. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017. Gordon, Edmund. "Confessions of a Fedhead." Spectator, 13 June 2015, p. 37+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA417556995&it=r&asid=efc4cc0903901adae4e9375e08579173. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017. Kuper, Simon. "Beauty and the beast." New Statesman, 26 June 2015, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA422059920&it=r&asid=56ee2085f55b73eee3e186514ad32d82. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017. "Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession." Publishers Weekly, 4 Apr. 2016, p. 77. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA448902752&it=r&asid=d80acee6c1aab0d87c192370f39f4fd0. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.

• Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/15/the-mighty-fed-julian-barnes-reviews-federer-and-me-story-obsession-william-skidelsky
  Word count: 2521

  The Mighty Fed – Julian Barnes reviews Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession by William Skidelsky
  Tennis becomes a channel for complex emotions, and fandom tips into fixation, as a writer pursues his sporting idol

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  Roger Federer on Wimbledon Centre Court. Photograph: Tom Jenkins
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  Julian Barnes
  Friday 15 May 2015 01.30 EDT Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 10.06 EST

  Imagine the scene on the last weekend of Wimbledon 2035. The mixed doubles final. The four players on court, knocking up, are all brothers and sisters. The umpire calls for quiet, then announces the match: “Federer and Miss Federer against Federer and Miss Federer. Federer to serve. Play!” This may have a fairly small statistical chance of happening: no champion at one of the game’s four major tournaments – apart from May Sutton Bundy, Věra Suková and Fred Stolle – has ever fathered or mothered another grand-slam winner. But it’s a consequence of Roger Federer’s exceptionalism – two pairs of twins! – that this pleasant fantasy can be floated.

  Such exceptionalism is also manifest in the following items. His intricate, intensely mobile and deadly forehand: in John McEnroe’s opinion, the two great shots of the recent era are Federer’s forehand and Justine Henin’s backhand. His attitude on court: what a certain type of commentator might call “class”, meaning a lack of all that strutting male bullshit, and a preternatural calmness – grunt-free, seemingly sweat-free – in the heat of battle. His pioneering and perfecting of the inside-out crosscourt forehand. His apparent ability to find a little more time than other players in which to select his shot. His self-reliance: for long periods he has operated without a coach telling him what to do with and about his game. His position at the head of the list of male grand-slam winners with 17 titles. The fact that he comes from Switzerland, whose previous best-known male player, Heinz Günthardt, never got beyond the quarter-finals of a grand-slam singles (though he won doubles titles and coached Steffi Graf). The fact that Federer’s wife is not the primped manicuree most players seem to sexually aspire to; that his work and family life appear properly balanced; that he takes his small children on the circuit. And if all this doesn’t do it for you, how about the fact that when he won his first Wimbledon title in 2003, the Swiss gave him a cow? If they carried on giving him one for each subsequent grand-slam victory, he’ll have quite a herd by now.

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  He is, of course, “only” a tennis player. And in the way of top international sports stars, he is a brand as much as a person. He is careful what he advertises, and as far as I can remember, has never said anything either political or even remotely controversial. He has a philanthropic foundation and a terrible signature: but then, constantly signing those jumbo tennis balls is unlikely to improve anyone’s orthography. We can only guess what he is “really” like; access is guarded, information scarce. Though agreeable and intelligent of manner, and – in the way of many top stars (except for British ones) – fluent in several languages, he hardly litters his press conferences with bons mots. You can’t imagine him, like McEnroe, going on to become a commentator, because you can’t imagine him either being that interested, or that good at it. And while peerlessly well-behaved on court in his glory years (which came so soon after the domineeringly crude antics of Jimmy Connors, Ilie Năstase and McEnroe), during his inevitable slow decline he gets crotchety, even ratty, when a shot deserts him. He says that he never looks back at defeats and disappointments, only forward – which is a routine world-attitude among major sportspersons. But perhaps, when the Mighty Fed eventually does retire, he will become just an ordinary, down-home multimillionaire, tending his children and his cows behind the 24-hour security fencing. Perhaps we shall even stop being interested in him. And perhaps – is this possible? – his ego is so uninvolved in his success that he will enjoy this.

  Unsurprisingly, there are no answers to these particular questions and mysteries in William Skidelsky’s book. He didn’t gain access to Federer; nor did he apply for it. In June 2014, at the pre-Wimbledon grass-court tournament in Halle, Germany, he did blag his way into the press room, and managed to ask his hero two questions. The first, relatively well-informed, was received with a smile; the second, ill-informed, was greeted with a scowl. He watches the player from tournament walkways, uncomfortable seats high up in the stands, comfortable ones in front of the flatscreen telly, and on YouTube. He doesn’t talk to anyone who has actually played against Federer; indeed, he doesn’t talk to anyone on the professional circuit. He talks to, and quotes, other people who have written about Federer. This is not to diminish the book, rather to define it; but it does put a lot of pressure on the title’s last two words: “And Me”.

  Nor was it the case for Skidelsky as for most Federophiles that virtually the first glimpse of the player – of the grace and variety of his game – led to a continuous state of fandom. Skidelsky first watched Federer at Wimbledon in 2003, but wasn’t immediately smitten. So his attention was simply absent as the rest of us wallowed in those now-distant years of 2004-2006, when Federer could and did beat anyone, when he became world number one, a title he then held for 237 consecutive weeks. Skidelsky’s attachment to the player has been much more sporadic, intense and alarming than that of most other fans, like those hosts of cheerful red-capped and red-backpacked women who follow their hero from tournament to tournament.

  The Federer topspin backhand. Photograph: STR/AP
  The Federer topspin backhand. Photograph: AP
  Boris Becker, defeated at Wimbledon and asked afterwards what had happened, famously replied, “I lost a tennis match, not a war. Nobody got killed.” Some found this facetious or subtly arrogant; though it was mainly a statement of the truth. Writers attracted to sport, however, are often keen to make it more than it is: preferably, a presiding metaphor for the rest of life. At Wimbledon in 2010 John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played the longest match in tennis history; it stretched over two and a bit days, with the fifth set won by 70 games to 68. While the players themselves headed for an ice-bath and a beer, others headed for the match’s deeper significance. Skidelsky approvingly quotes Geoff Dyer, who called this two‑man marathon, in which the same moves were endlessly repeated – guess the adjective – Yes! – “Beckettian”. Dyer saw Isner versus Mahut as an existential drama, a battle to keep “non-existence at bay”. So, in a tennis match, as in life, “sudden death and perpetual extension are inextricably paired”. This kind of panting nonsense comes easily to a certain type of literary bloke. Sometimes – indeed, almost always – a very long tennis match is just a very long tennis match.

  Skidelsky also knows that Federer’s tennis is more than just Federer’s tennis; but for him it is not a metaphor, rather something which has been absorbed into the texture and meaning of his own life. There are three overlapping elements to his book. First, an account of the technical aspects of the game, from racket technology to body-position, which he writes about with insight and fluency. Second, descriptions of those matches of Federer’s he has watched, which are efficiently done, even if slightly boring in the way that battle sequences in biographies of Napoleon are boring (we know the outcome in advance, also the general strategies and turning-points). Third, there is the “And Me”. Skidelsky is the younger son of the (tennis-playing) economic historian Robert Skidelsky, whose patriarchal dominance and priorities of value provoke in William a quasi-Oedipal response. Though he is a child of privilege and appears outwardly successful – Eton and Oxford, good social status, foreign travel, never without a girlfriend – Skidelsky also suffers from lassitude and has depression. He takes the pills; he sees a psychoanalyst three times a week for eight years. His main problem is classic, male and English: “denial of emotion”, a deficiency which “is stitched into one’s being”. What, you might ask, does this have to do with tennis? Everything, as it turns out. Federer acts in his life as a kind of sporting comfort blanket: when Roger wins, William is happy; when he loses, Roger’s public pain helps salve William’s private pain.

  Skidelsky played tennis up to county level as a junior, then quit in adolescence because it was his father’s territory, and took up cricket instead. By late 2006, when he was 30, he had started playing tennis again, and when he now saw Federer it was with different and suddenly adoring eyes: “I knew that I wanted to follow this man, take what opportunities I could to luxuriate in the silky wondrousness of his play. My obsession had begun.” To some extent, it is an obsession like any other fan’s, involving much joy and despair, jumping on sofas, and hating those (like Nadal) who have found a way to beat the hero. In other ways, it is sui generis and pathological. This is emphasised by the way Skidelsky writes about it. When he discusses top‑spin, or Federer’s tennis grip, or the fast-food outlets at Halle, or life in the camping-ground for long-term queuers at Wimbledon, his prose is easy and his narrative rhythms normal. But when obliged to confront the human psyche, his prose becomes awkward and costive; it’s as if he’s deeply uneasy with his own presence in his own book. And though he is able to identify and refer to emotional states, his ability to evoke them, characterise or colourise them, let alone follow through on their consequences, feels remarkably limited. It is as if therapy has given him a language with which to recognise certain aspects of his nature, without this leading to more than a primitive form of insight.

  The most extreme example of this comes towards the end of the book. Skidelsky’s then girlfriend (now wife), a criminal barrister, falls pregnant, but there is something so seriously wrong with the child that a termination becomes necessary at 18 weeks:

  My girlfriend, understandably grief-stricken, wanted closeness, intimacy. But I ran away from my feelings – and, by extension, from her. As ever, I sought refuge in tennis. This was the week of the World Tour Finals.

  And so he rushes off to the O2 in Greenwich, day after day. When Federer reaches the semi-finals Skidelsky makes a suggestion to his girlfriend:

  Watching tennis, I said, might be a useful way to take our minds off what had happened. Rather remarkably, she agreed: I think by this point she despairingly felt that if she couldn’t beat me, she might as well join me.

  They go to Greenwich, and there follows an intense, two-page description of watching Federer live. His victory gives Skidelsky “a sense of gratitude, of joyousness”. All of which leads to this:

  Before our trip to the O2, things with my girlfriend had not been good. The events of the previous few weeks had driven us apart. I’d coped with it all in the worst possible way. But now a reconnection took place. I’d been using tennis as a means of escape – but that night it effected a kind of return. The beauty of Federer’s game shook me from the confines of my ego and enabled me, once more, to see the true relations of the world. Denial gave way to lucidity; what had been distorted became clear. I was returned to myself, to my life, to my girlfriend, and it now seemed possible to properly confront what had happened, and to move on, together, into the future.

  Repeated rereadings haven’t make this passage any less weird. Little did Federer know, while beating Novak Djokovic 6-1, 6-4, what his real function in the world was: to mend William Skidelsky’s psyche. One wishes him well, of course, but though psychoanalysis and Federer have equipped him with a certain level of self-knowledge, he seems still to be lacking any notion of what life feels like on the racket-head. Nor does he evince much curiosity about what it must be like to be his girlfriend. She gets not a word, not an opinion, not a direct expression of feeling. Does he consider what it must be like for her that their relationship was mended and that they were able to “move on” because Federer’s forehand happened to be sizzle-hot in Greenwich that day? This lowering absence also makes you realise that, for all the analysis of his conflict with his father, there is barely a word in the whole book about his mother.

  So “Me and Federer”, as it ought to be called, is one of the strangest sports‑books I’ve ever read. And, just as strangely, it ends with the preposterous notion of Federer as an “under-achiever”. Skidelsky compares him to two other noted – indeed, flagrant - under-achievers: the cricketer Graeme Hick (a punitive batsman at county level who flopped repeatedly for England) and the snooker player Jimmy White (who has never won the world championship). It’s true that the Mighty Fed didn’t win every single match he ever played in straight sets. But with those 17 grand slams (three more than anyone else), he has underachieved only in the sense that Tiger Woods, Donald Bradman and Pelé underachieved. Shakespeare did too, for that matter – some of his plays really aren’t quite as good as some of his other plays. Perhaps Skidelsky’s need to see Federer as an underachiever is less to do with objective, or even fannish, analysis, and more to do with his own psychological needs. Such a belief might make easier the letting-go he will have to endure when Federer finally retires.

  Oh, and I checked about the cows; but my notion of a companionable herd was much exaggerated. The first cow Federer was given – for winning Wimbledon in 2003– was called Juliette. She was subsequently sent to a farm in Austria, and slaughtered in 2007 for not producing enough milk. He received a second one, Desiree, in 2013, as a reward for returning to compete, after a decade’s absence, in the Swiss Open. As far as we know, Desiree is still in a good state of health.

  • Julian Barnes’s Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art is out from Cape. An extract from Federer and Me will appear in the Observer on 24 May.

• Financial Times
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  ‘Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession’, by William Skidelsky

  Roger Federer at the US Open semi-finals in 2009, when he defeated Novak Djokovic
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  MAY 29, 2015 by: Review by Laurence Scott
  Following a brutal fifth-set loss to Roger Federer in the 2009 Wimbledon final, Andy Roddick, with teary eyes and without a hint of menace, tells interviewer Sue Barker that Federer “deserves everything he gets”. Shortly after, Federer assures Roddick over his shoulder that he knows how he feels. “Don’t be too sad, I went through some rough ones as well.” He mentions his defeat the previous year against Rafael Nadal, and then Roddick, doomed never to win this title, reminds Federer that he had already won five Wimbledons by that point.

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  I remember thinking how ironic it was that Roddick, with his slight waddle and backwards baseball cap, was so much more gentlemanly than the gold-trimmed, suave Federer. But then again, when do I ever think about comparative “gentlemanliness”? One aspect of the so-called cult of Federer is that it coerces me into inane judgments that I wouldn’t normally make.

  Over the years Federer’s talent has been clumsily translated into an uneasy and dominant vocabulary of class. He is repeatedly figured as the one-man aristocracy of modern tennis. Even nobility is sometimes too humble a metaphor for his followers. His beautiful style of play, with its occasional moments of apparent impossibility, has inspired multiple commentators to compare him to Apollo, god of the sun, medicine and the arts. I’m surprised that they have yet to raise the added evidence of Federer’s sister Diana, for Apollo also had, in certain tongues, a sister of that name.

  In Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession, the journalist and critic William Skidelsky explores his relationship to the Federer cult, looking for a new vocabulary to describe his hero. Since obsession doesn’t encourage clearsightedness, this task is challenging from the outset, and matters are complicated by the difficulties of writing about the ineffable grace of sporting genius. In David Foster Wallace’s famous essay “Roger Federer as Religious Experience”, to which Skidelsky refers several times, Wallace claims that “A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke.”

  Skidelsky approaches this problem by proposing that Federer’s essential beauty lies in his very resistance to category. The champion has “lots” of “contrasting physical attributes”. His technique is “at least as much about discordance and disruption as about order and harmony”. Skidelsky finds watching him “both comforting and terrifying”, and compares his game to both “neat ordered gardens and vertiginous Alpine mountain ranges”. Federer, he proposes, “makes the ball — or, one could say, the universe — slow down, bends it to his own stately pace”. There’s no inherent problem with such flights of fancy but, as all good fantasy and sci-fi writers know, you need to keep your fanciful worlds internally cogent.

  Unsurprisingly, he is not as generous to Federer’s great rival, Nadal. For Wallace, Nadal is Dionysus to Federer’s Apollo, while Skidelsky confusingly presents Nadal as a two-for-one deal of these binary gods of order and misrule. Nadal is somehow both “machine-like” and “emphatically corporeal”. Unlike Federer, Nadal’s “body, and its extrusions, are impossible to ignore. He grunts, he sweats, his face contorts.” Skidelsky reminds us that in some online circles, Nadal has been compared to a semi-aquatic South American rodent, adding that the Spaniard vanquishes opponents in the manner of a Boa constrictor strangling its prey. He also cites Nadal’s “odd combination of fallibility and fortitude”. Thus, while Federer is sublime, a miraculous set of paradoxes, Nadal is merely odd, bulging and misshapen with inconsistency.

  When Skidelsky grounds his analysis of Federer and the game in material terms, he writes with impressive insight. His discussion of Federer’s hybrid forehand grip, which combines aspects of tennis’s past and present, is excellent. With clarity he illuminates the champion’s striking position as both a preserver and innovator of the sport. In these terms he finds interesting contrasts to Nadal, whose game can rightly be thought of as “hyper-contemporary” in its vigorous exploitation of recent advances in rackets and strings. In exploring these technical realities Skidelsky engages with the sport’s true poetry, which eludes him elsewhere in the laboured metaphysics of time-bending and shape-shifting.

  The book is best, then, when Skidelsky adopts a less figurative language. He captures the inner life of childhood in the simple, beautiful image of himself as a boy, standing sideways on to his ping-pong table and rallying alone against the wall, dreams of victory unfurling as the ball bounces to and fro. Like Skidelsky, I played regional junior tennis, and I have stood for hours at the same solipsistic angle to my own ping-pong table, lost in comparable fantasies of greatness.

  Skidelsky briefly alludes to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the infamous portrait of an obsession that incidentally contains the best descriptions of tennis playing I have ever read. Nabokov communicates obsession’s blinding qualities in Humbert Humbert’s unreliable narration. We witness Humbert groping around among slippery metaphors, trying to catch some stable meaning. In a crucial scene of desire he is simultaneously “the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess” and the possessor of “ageing ape eyes”, while also being “a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood”. For her part, Lolita, in her “stern dark spectacles”, shape-shifts in a few sentences from Humbert’s kneeling “Riviera love” to “the little Herr Doktor who was to cure me of all my aches”.

  Lolita illustrates how meaning disintegrates under the pressures of fanatic devotion. When Skidelsky considers all the hours he has spent on Federer, at the expense of other arguably more sensible pursuits, he concludes that: “A meaningful existence, for me, is one in which meaninglessness has room to flourish.” In this respect he could have done with some of the Swiss’s neat, ordered gardening. His Federer inevitably buckles under the symbolic weight on his shoulders (“the source from which his power emanates”), becoming an impossible composite that ultimately fractures.

  And yet, in the reflective surface of these shards we can assemble a figure loaded with touching, human significance. We see Skidelsky himself, a more or less coherent mosaic of his past selves, his sorrows and moral blind spots. There he is, the lonely kid at school, then suffering depression during and after university. But he’s brave and resilient, too, striving for joy and meaning in his fluctuating enthusiasms: tennis, cricket, English, history, cooking. His contradictions are mortal rather than sublime, and I believe in them. I believe in the boy rallying against the wall and dreaming of tennis greatness. But I can’t believe in his successor’s surreal fantasies of gods and beautiful monsters and the epiphanies that they impart, before disappearing through the changing-room doors.

  Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession, by William Skidelsky, Yellow Jersey, RRP£16.99, 288 pages

  Laurence Scott’s ‘The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World’ is published next month by Heinemann

  Photograph: David Lobel/Corbis

• Independent
  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/federer-and-me-a-story-of-obsession-by-will-skidelsky-book-review-an-engaging-read-10267137.html
  Word count: 732

  Federer and Me: a Story of Obsession by Will Skidelsky, book review: An engaging read
  Genius tennis-playing collides with a personal tale – with mixed results

  Simon O'Hagan @SimonOHagan Thursday 21 May 2015 14:00 BST0 comments

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  Late rally: Roger Federer's later career is the focus of Skidelsky's studies Getty Images
  Obsession is a strong word. And in the context of sport, the obsession bar is set very high. There are football fans who never miss a match; cycling fans whose idea of a holiday is three weeks following the Tour de France in a camper van; snooker fans who'll go wherever Ronnie O'Sullivan goes. Obsession has a very dark side. It was a Steffi Graf obsessive who stabbed Monica Seles.

  I'm not sure that Will Skidelsky's "Story of Obsession" passes the obsession test, in part because of who he is obsessed by. Few dispute that Roger Federer is both the greatest and the most aesthetically pleasing player in tennis history, so to be powerfully affected by him is perfectly understandable. Tim Henman and Me: A Story of Obsession – now that would have been different.

  There's a further problem with Federer and Me in that Federer is a long way into his career before Skidelsky really picks up on him, in the late Noughties. Skidelsky has missed many of his triumphs. There's a sense in which he's playing catch-up, not least because David Foster Wallace cornered the market in literary appreciation of Federer with his 2006 essay in the New York Times, "Federer as Religious Experience", albeit that Skidelsky acknowledges the piece. Plus the book is coming out with Federer nearing the end of his career, and in tennis terms it feels like the author is trying to hit winners from deep behind the baseline. So what's left? In fact, quite a lot.

  Federer and Me is thought-provoking, instructive and highly readable. Skidelsky has a central thesis – that Federer is both classical and modern – which he underpins with keen insights into both his character and his technique. A chapter about the evolution of racket technology is positively gripping. He is excellent on the changes tennis has undergone in the past few decades, and on what makes it such a rewarding sport to watch. And from out of nowhere comes a hatchet job on Federer's great rival Rafa Nadal, one of the most popular players of this or any other era. For that alone Skidelsky gets marks for original thinking.

  The freshness of the writing is perhaps attributable to Skidelsky's distance from the professional tennis circuit. He is not jaded from round after round of boring post-match press conferences. When he does attend tournaments – notably a wide-eyed visit he makes to one in Halle in Germany – he remains very much the fan, not the sportswriter, though he or his editor should still know how to spell Maria Bueno.

  Then there is the "me" side of Federer and Me. This places the book very much in a tradition that started nearly a quarter of a century ago with Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch – sports books that are as much explorations of male identity, "personal journeys" in which the author's relationship with his father is key. Skidelsky's father is the historian and biographer Robert Skidelsky. He pops up from time to time, rarely sympathetically. Skidelsky's girlfriends are likewise problematic figures until he finally marries and settles down.

  Skidelsky looks to his own tennis for fulfilment, but the promising 10-year-old grows up to be no more than a respectable club player. He follows an uncertain path through school, university and beyond towards a career in literary journalism. Depression and therapy put in appearances. His life is touched by tragedy, and we're asked to believe that a trip to see Federer play helps alleviate it. The genre demands this approach, but these personal aspects sit rather uneasily. Skidelsky never emerges as enough of a character to bring to life episodes such as the one in which he loses his virginity. You're left wondering what the story is doing there.

  Even Federer's most ardent fans might concede that he can take himself a touch seriously. And Skidelsky has the same tendency in what is otherwise a thoroughly engaging book.

• Mostly Food and Travel Journal
  http://www.mostlyfood.co.uk/Authentik%20Gourmet%20Guides.htm
  Word count: 410

  Authentik Gourmet Guides
  These are quite exceptional little books. Small in format, I should say, but full of the most useful information sufficient for any enthusiastic foodAuthentik Guides lover. This series is quite eye-catching - the well-designed brown card covers are a stylish trade mark.

  I have enjoyed the Authentik Gourmet guides to both London and Paris. They allow you an insight into the culinary scene by offering background information, a bit of history and culture as well as lists of, for example, shops selling kitchen utensils, lists of wine courses, and cookery schools. You’ll find the usual directories of restaurants, numerous maps, but also sections called City Secrets, in which the movers and shakers in the current food arena divulge some of their favourite establishments – this makes fascinating reading.

  It’s nice to find a guide that is relevant equally to the resident and to the tourist. The local will obviously be familiar with lots of the suggested eateries but, unless you are the sort that dines out in restaurants three times each week and spends the other evenings researching local food issues, you will still manage to find much that is new and interesting.

  The sketches by Alain Bouldouyre are charming and add much to the overall appeal. These books would make the most fantastic gifts for anyone going away for a special weekend or city break. They make lovely souvenirs in themselves but the guides have an elastic band closure and you are supplied with a little notebook to enable you to make each volume truly unique. Tuck a pencil inside and add your own experiences and opinions. Expand on those of the author.

  If these little guides are still too much baggage for the foodie on the go, then you can download all the addresses onto a mobile phone. It sounds quite technical but the computer-savvy would have no problem with the method. I’ll stick to the paper versions!

  The author of the Gourmet London guide, William Skidelsky, knows his stuff and writes for The Guardian, The Spectator and the New Statesman. Author of Gourmet Paris is Canadian-born Rosa Jackson who moved to France in 1995 to give culinary tours of the city, and now designs tailor-made food itineraries. She is also an author of two French language cookbooks.

  For more information about Authentik guides please contact cphillips@footprintbooks.com

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