Jean-Paul Sartre is the author of possibly the most notorious one-liner of twentieth-century philosophy: 'Hell is other people'. Albert Camus was The Outsider. The two men first came together in Occupied Paris in the middle of the Second World War, and quickly became friends, comrades, and mutual admirers. But the intellectual honeymoon was short-lived. In 1943, with Nazis patrolling the streets, Sartre and Camus sat in a café on the boulevard Saint-Germain with Simone de Beauvoir and began a discussion about life and love and literature that would pull them all together and finally tear them apart. They ended up on opposite sides in a war of words over just about everything: women, philosophy, politics. Their fraught, fractured friendship culminated in a bitter and very public feud that was described as 'the end of a love-affair' but which never really finished. Sartre was a boxer and a drug-addict; Camus was a goalkeeper who subscribed to a degree-zero approach to style and ecstasy. Sartre, obsessed with his own ugliness, took up the challenge of accumulating women; Camus, part-Bogart, part-Samurai, was also a self-confessed Don Juan who aspired to chastity. Sartre and Camus play out an epic struggle between the symbolic and the savage. But what if the friction between these two unique individuals is also the source of our own inevitable conflicts? The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camusreconstructs the intense and antagonistic relationship that was (in Sartre's terms) 'doomed to failure'. Weaving together the lives and ideas and writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Andy Martin relives the existential drama that still binds them inseparably together and remixes a philosophical dialogue that speaks to us now.

"Lose the game," she said. "Lose the game or everyone dies." A wave of euphoria is sweeping across the British Kingdom. Differences have been set aside and people are bound together by their devotion to the Guiding Principles of Joy and Compassion and their love for the Great Unifier – soccer. The whole world wants to be a part of it, but for Josh Pittman, the world is a place he feels he doesn't fit in. Bored, listless and somehow immune to the sporting paradise around him, he can't even muster the enthusiasm to play in goal for his local team. But when a chance encounter with a mysterious young woman leaves him with a broken nose, a stolen car and a warning that humanity is under attack from a hidden race of supernatural beings, Josh thinks he may have found his purpose in life – and someone to share it with. The only question is, what has any of it got to do with him? As the final of the grandest international tournament in history looms and strange deaths at stadiums across the globe go unreported, Josh is whisked away on a journey through time and space to uncover the truth behind mankind's very existence – and the role he is destined to play in what might just be the world's worst case of mistaken identity...

The Goalkeeper's Revenge is comprised of stories of a Lancashire childhood: of football on the streets, fishing, fighting and school, of growing up and looking for work, and of characters such as Spit Nolan the champion trolley-rider, Sim Dalt the goalkeeper and Maggie Gregory the amazing reader.

Martin Nicholson was born in 1937 in Rio de Janeiro, where his father was working for Shell. He had sailed across the Atlantic twice before he was three years old, the second time just days after the start of the Second World War when the family returned to South America to live near Buenos Aires in Argentina. They returned to England in 1946 to experience the realities of 'austerity Britain' of the 1950s. They faced the bitter winter of 1946-1947 in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham, then moved to Twickenham, south west London, where they made their first real home. Like many middle class English boys of that era he went through the discipline of boarding school, in Swanage on the south coast, and at Oundle School, Peterborough. This book - the first of a projected series of four volumes that will take his memoirs up to retirement from the Diplomatic Service in 1997 - tells the story of a childhood constantly on the move, but always in the bosom of a secure and loving family - his parents and three siblings.