The Independent

With so many hi-tech tools available for managers to assess players these days, it's possibly a surprise that football scouts, like Saturday-evening pink 'uns and balls with laces, haven't been relegated to history.

But most League clubs still employ a network of trusted observers to run the rule over potential transfer targets and prepare reports on forthcoming opponents, and Les Padfield, a teacher in his day job, started scouting for Preston under David Moyes and is currently clocking up the motorway miles for Bolton Wanderers.

There can be no more fitting successors to Dame Edna Everage's crown of Australia's Housewife Superstars than Kim McCosker and Rachael Bermingham. For a start, the "Queensland Battered Vegetables" from their best-selling 4 Ingredients cookery book, can so easily be imagined served on Tupperware canapé trays in Moonee Ponds.

On the Chris Evans radio show, the pair are cheerfully – if tunelessly – singing along to the Aussie national anthem and calling everyone "Darl".

Described in the publisher's blurb as a "counter-cultural thriller", this is a story of sex and drugs and revenge, set partly in 1980s Coventry, partly in Hoxha's Albania, partly in Malaga and partly in India. The radical politics, the racism, and the 2 Tone music scene in 1980s Britain are vividly recreated. There are three first-person narrators: Jez, a working-class petty criminal with mental health issues; Pads, a middle-class drug-dealer of slightly sociopathic tendency; and Mehmet, an Albanian killer on the run. Their stories don't converge until the very end.

Windows on the Moon, like the recently reissued London Belongs to Me, Norman Collins's near-million seller from 1945, evokes that teeming, bygone world of Lyons Corner Houses and smoky cafes, of shared vernaculars and common leisure pursuits, a society which is broadly speaking homogenous and where individual personalities have to fight their way through layers of protocol and class-consciousness to achieve distinction.

Just after 7am on 17 April 1860 in a field outside Farnborough, Tom Sayers from Brighton and the New Yorker John Heenan shook hands, then stripped to the waist. Boxing's first world title fight was about to begin. Thirty-seven bloody bare-knuckle rounds later, the bout ended in chaos as Sayers' corner collapsed the ring, claiming their man, five inches shorter and 40lb lighter than his opponent, was being strangled on the ropes. The outcome was officially a draw.

An ethical guide to the practicalities of modern travel is a welcome addition to the crop of eco-lit, and more thought-provoking than some dashed-off books about composting toilets and offsetting like mad. Even seasoned travellers might be surprised, among chapters on China, Syria and Iran, to kick off in Australia and the Maldives. But Popescu is eloquent about their record on human rights. Suggestions for What To Do are most welcome - though some (visit the Diane Lang foundation in South Africa) seem more useful than others ("start a blog" about "indigenous rights"). KG

The world in which England's Tom Sayers and America's John Heenan met for boxing's first world championship bout, on 17 April, 1860, was one in violent flux.

From Henry James via Mavis Gallant to Edmund White, stories about innocent Americans being undone by encounters with wicked Old Europe are a well-used literary trope. US writer Joseph Olshan seems well aware that his latest novel, The Conversion, sits on the tassel on the end of this tradition; he name-checks James early on. His plotting, however, is most unJamesian in its candour.

From Maria Aparecida the seen-it-all matriarch to the soft-hearted parish priest Father Denilson; from the orphaned whore Gabriela to Ivone, the wannabe diva of the telenovelas, and Sergio the street vendor who, aged seven, heads his family: this swift-flowing, strong-flavoured novel begins in an operatic interplay of voices.

Shortly before inauguration day in January 2001, satirical newspaper The Onion published a fictional report of a speech by the incoming US President. George W Bush, wrote the paper's staff, had assured his audience that their "long national nightmare of peace and prosperity [was] finally over."

The Independent published an article on Austin Stevens on June 21st, entitled [unicode convert failure on character 8216]Love at First Bite: The Snake Man of South Africa’. Stevens’s life and his contributions to the protection of endangered species are discussed. The book is recommended at the end of the article.