To most modern day tennis fans, it was impossible to believe that until the late 1960s pro tennis players—that is those who played openly for prize money—were banned from competing in the world's major tournaments. Before this time, the great contests such as Wimbledon were exclusive to so-called amateurs. Amateur tennis players were meant to compete only for glory. Though this division arose the "pro tour" in the 1930s, and it endured for forty years. In The Pros, The Forgotten Era of Tennis, author Peter Underwood explains why professional players were forced into what was often called the traveling circus where these sporting outcasts played each other during long and rather tatty tours all over the world. Focusing on the eight champions who dominated the pro era beginning in 1930 with the ultimately tragic figure of "Big" Bill Tilden, this book follows each pro champion through the post-1962 Grand Slam pro career of Rod Laver, who then helped usher in the modern-era of pro tennis with the start of the "Open" Era in 1968.

At the age of 20, Dennis Horn won his first English Rose - the emblem of a National track champion. Throughout the 1930s he rapidly graduated from the rough and tumble of makeshift grass track racing at country fairs and gala sports days in provincial towns to assail the heights of British track cycling on the great urban cycling bastions of the time - the hard-surfaced stadiums of London's Herne Hill and Manchester's Fallowfield - and become the star of British track racing. Every year from 1931 to 1938 he was awarded the season-long Meredith Trophy to add to those legendary gold and silver cups he'd won in fiercely contested track battles in front of crowds of tens of thousands. It was a cycling scene entirely unique to Britain in the years before World War II. But this is more than a simple tale of a strapping rural lad who took on and beat the streetwise metropolitan champions of his era. Dennis Horn, son of a Fenland blacksmith, proved himself to be as astute as any of his urban contemporaries at treading the fine line between amateurism and professionalism as defined by the puritanical British cycling establishment of their day.

Borley Rectory in Essex, built in 1862, should have been an ordinary Victorian clergyman's house. However, just a year after its construction, unexplained footsteps were heard within the house, and from 1900 until it burned down in 1939 numerous paranormal phenomena, including phantom coaches and shattering windows, were observed. In 1929 the house was investigated by the Daily Mail and paranormal researcher Harry Price, and it was he who called it 'the most haunted house in England.' Price also took out a lease of the rectory from 1937 to 1938, recruiting forty-eight 'official observers' to monitor occurences. After his death in 1948, the water was muddied by claims that Price's findings were not genuine paranormal activity, and ever since there has been a debate over what really went on at Borley Rectory. Paul Adams, Eddie Brazil and Peter Underwood here present a comprehensive guide to the history of the house and the ghostly (or not) goings-on there.

This was the first book on London's ghosts, when Peter Underwood was President of the Ghost Club. He is uniquely qualified to write Haunted London, presenting a parade and gazetteer of the psychic phenomena of Britain's capital city - a city with nearly ten million living inhabitants and the ghosts of many dead ones. As well as all the famous hauntings - the Cock Lane ghost, the Grey Man at Drury Lane, the Tower ghosts, the haunted house at Berkeley Square etc. - the book contains many new and hitherto unpublished findings. Not all ghosts date back to earlier centuries: there are ghost motorcyclists, for instance, and new buildings on the sites of older ones are as likely to have ghosts as those which still stand. For easy reference, Haunted London has divided up London geographically. Ghostly associations are uncovered in churches, theatres, hotels, inns and scenes of murders. Poltergeist infestation is another phenomenon included in this work which is sure to fascinate anyone wanting to get to know London better - whether they be visitors, psychic researchers, students of history, of legend or folklore, or simply lovers of one of the world's finest cities.