As sport has grown, progressively replacing religion in its power to excite passion, provide emotional escape, and offer fraternal and sororital bonding, it has come to loom larger and larger in the lives of Europeans and others. It has become an inescapable reality linking public environment with intimate experience and thus offers the historian an opportunity to inspect and attempt to grasp all the dimensions of the recent past and their relative share in individual and collective experience. These essays consider the evolution of modern sport in Europe and examine its relationship with politics, gender and class.