Elvestad a village in southern Norway population 2327

Elvestad, a village in southern Norway; population 2,327. A church, a petrol station, a school, a post office, a roadside caf?a one-stop shop, and, after disputes, a shopping mall. This is still an agriculture-oriented community – “NO FARMER, NO NORWAY” says a poster – and its small businesses reflect this; Gunder Jomann’s, for instance, which sells farm machinery. There she learned that, having no formal training and being, as she put it, “a few shades duskier” than the English nurses, her services would not be required.

Undeterred, she made her own way to Balaclava and erected her British Hotel, providing the army with medical attention, tender care and cheese sandwiches.Sadly, though, Ramdin’s biography of this extraordinary woman is merely perfunctory, and dry in a way that’s ill-suited to its subject. Having spent her life travelling and combating disease wherever she could, she was in her early fifties when she heard that there was important work to be done in the Crimea, and set sail for London to report to the War Office. When the final whistle blows he reuses the standard footballing clich?to cobble together a match report and invents some quotes from the manager, safe in the knowledge that he won’t be caught out because nobody in football reads the broadsheets for fear of seeming homosexual.Shabby, heavy-drinking and bilious, he’s equally ill- at-ease in his personal life. And combined with the God’s-eye view of the world that modern media afford us, it’s enough to deceive us into thinking that our choices are meaningful. By the book’s end he’s convinced you that we’ve surpassed Nietzsche’s supermen, and that soon we’ll have usurped God too.

He’s too canny to say whether that’s good or bad of course, but does at least insist that it’s important we recognise it.The Man Who Hated Football by Will Buckley (HARPER PERENNIAL £7.99) Jimmy Stirling is Chief Football Writer for a Sunday broadsheet, at a time when football writers are paid more money and awarded more column inches for their opinions than ever before. He’s grown bored of the game, though, and contemptuous of both players and fans. He loathes his colleagues, and despairs of the ludicrous prominence accorded to the sport, such that the country’s most popular newspapers, “could tell you more about the state of Steven Gerrard’s groin than what might or might not be happening in the entire continent of Africa”.A typical Saturday afternoon finds him reporting on a relegation battle in which he has no interest, arriving in time for the second half but without a clue which team is which. We’re incessantly addressed by performers, politicians, advertisers and, for that matter, smartass cultural theorists, all of them clamouring for our valuable time and attention. Which particular insight is not new, but seems fresh and apposite again after Zengotita exposes the mechanics of the process, and explains how it accounts for the cult of celebrity and the general narcissism of our age.His most original insight – obvious when you think about it – concerns what he’s labelled “the flattery of representation”. The result is that we construct our own identities and personalities like method actors performing in a drama of our own devising. His hip and hyper book almost audibly buzzes with observations and excitable theories about these accelerated and unreal times, and posits that the recent exponential proliferation of images, information and options in the developed world has dissolved the barrier between reality and representation.