Philosophy Football co-founder Mark Perryman reveals the 2011 books that have helped inspire the company’s T-shirt production line this year.

The quality newspapers fill pages and pages this time of year with assorted celebs selecting their various books of the year. Cheap and predictable journalism. It’s the same faces year after year, with rarely any surprises to be found within the acreage of words produced.

Never mind. At Philosophy Football, self-styled 'sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction', we pride ourselves on doing things differently. Each and every one of our T-shirts in 2011 has been inspired by something we read, saw, heard or were ideologically inclined towards. It’s not a conventional way to make a books of the year selection but we hope it produces a list of books you might otherwise not have put on your last-minute requests for Santa.

Anniversaryism can force a culture of always looking backwards. But when it comes to World War Two we are firm believers in marking these anniversaries to remind ourselves that this was a battle to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and the evils of Nazism and fascism. Separate the anniversary from the cause and all that is left is the celebration of martial culture. Without fail Philosophy Football always make the connection,as we did in 2011 when marking the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Eastern Front against fascism. Our Leningrad T-shirt was a tribute to the extraordinary heroism of those who defended their city against the longest military siege of the war, from 1941-44. Anna Reid's historic account, Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege 1941-44 deserves to enjoy the same kind of popularity as Anthony Beevor's best-selling . Her is a book that with its richness of detail and personal testimony helps restore the centrality of the incredible suffering of those who fought to defeat Nazism on the Eastern front to the history of WW2.

Music books too often produce sanitised ghosted biographies which tell us little or nothing about either the artist or the wider social and cultural context in which they produce their work. Owen Hatherley's Uncommon was neatly timed to coincide with one of the hits of the 2011 summer festival circuit, Pulp's reunion. But the author didn't just retell the tale of 1990s Britpop. Instead, he connected Pulp's music to an exploration of the meaning of class. It sounds an uncomfortable mix, but just like Pulp's anthemic Common People the book worked gloriously well. Pulp's uncanny mix of anger and wit was the kind of combination we sought too with one of our own best-sellers of 2011, the Does My Society Look Big in This? shirt.

Another book with a brilliant insight into class politics was Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, author Owen Jones, just like Hatherley , innovatively uses themes from popular culture to expose the inequalities a class system generates, taking a well-deserved pot shot at middle and upper class comedians,Little Britain being amongst the worst offenders, making a living out of the barely disguised distaste they have for those they consider somehow ‘beneath’ them. Academic Danny Dorling in his latest book So You Think you Know about Britain? meantime provides the figures to prove definitively the persistence of class as the central factor in determining life chances. It sounds like a dry read, it is anything but, the narrative skillfully constructed to create a compelling narrative of modern Britain.

Englishness as a soft, inclusive, internationalist patriotism has long been one of our T-shirted themes, the re-issue in an updated version of Tom Nairn's book on how the Monarchy shapes and distorts Englishness,The Enchanted Glass is most welcome. While an invaluable new contribution to the progressive patriotism debate, Alex Niven's Folk Opposition not only has a brilliant title (there must be a 2012 T-shirt idea in that??) but also provides a much needed critique of the cosily pastoral versions of Englishness that an oppositionalist alternative requires too.

Philosophy Football was founded in a ground-floor Tottenham flat. It’s a place that in many ways decisively shaped the company’s early days. And club-wise, it was no accident that Spurs Double-Winning Captain Danny Blanchflower's " The game is about glory, doing things in style' was one of the earliest quotes to decorate one of our shirts. Today Tottenham is part of Philosophy Football’s history but its not somewhere we'll ever forget. No fans of new Labour the local MP, David Lammy, was not somebody likely to inspire a T-shirt but out of office he seems to have renewed himself. His book on Tottenham and the riots, Out of the Ashes is easily the best book written by an elected politician in years. Passionate, hugely informed by his constituency in every sense of the word, a politician who's practical realism is infused by his idealism too. This is the kind of MP Tottenham deserves, it’s just such a shame that Blairism extinguished all these qualities from him when he was in a position to do something to change the society he now so powerfully critiques.

If there's one newspaper columnist who could be chosen to 'represent' the description of 2011 as a year of protest it surely has to be Laurie Penny. Immersed in this movement, through her writing she has become for an impressive range of media outlets its diarist too. That can attract the bile of envy as well as the pleasure of plaudits, but admirably Laurie has stuck to her commitment throughout and produced a fine line in writing. Pluto have handily put together in one book a selection of some of her best from 2011, Penny Red : Notes from the New Age of Dissent. Its the best account from the streets of dissent you are likely to read this side of any revolution.

The generation which Philosophy Footballis part of enjoyed the vital benefit of 'free' higher education. Of course it was anything but free. The years at University paid for many times over via what we have paid in taxes ever since. No complaints there, and if it was good enough for us why on earth isn't it good enough for today's students? Thankfully, none of us pay a special fee, or have to take out a government loan, if we spend time in hospital, so why should the three years some spend in Higher Education be any different? And if there are extra fees to pay for items of choice how about ones we can opt out of paying our taxes for then, like nuclear weapons or funding the war in Iraq? University tuition fees are a nonsensical policy with one sole purpose, university education to be marketised and sold to those who can afford it. An incisive analysis of the policy and well-argued opposition is provided by The Assault on Universities edited by Michael Bailey and Des Freedman. While for those with kids of school age the situation is scarcely any better either. Cuts of course, but also a highly ideological drive towards not only selection but also a two tier education system, based like the universities so-called policy on a discriminatory mix of marketisation and ability to pay. A tireless campaigner for local schools, Melissa Benn has now written a highly readable account of the consequences of this mistreatment of education, School Wars.

2011 will for ever be identified with Tahrir Square. A place where democracy was first demanded, and then defended. This Christmas Tahrir inspired what is proving to be one of our most popular shirts, using the street sign that has directed hundreds of thousands of Egyptians to the protests, the Tahrir Square T-shirt. In 2012 there will be a pile of books about the Egyptian revolution but already one of the best has been produced via the same instant journalism that carried the reports as Tahrir erupted as a symbol of global defiance, Tweets from Tahrir, edited by Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns has all the sparkling immediacy of these brief communications from a world on the move. Tahrir was of of course part of what has now become a global movement of protest, here at home this began with the wave of student protests as 2010 closed, chronicled with energy and imagination in Clare Solomon and Tania Palmieri's Springtime : The New Student Rebellions. But as the Arab Spring unfolded there was one place where occupation, illegal settlements, an Apartheid Wall, brutally dehumanising checkpoints and worse remained, Palestine. Published for the first time in English this year was S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh. A fictionalised account of the tragedy that 1948 came to mean for all Palestinians when they lost their homes and land to the Israelis, and why that history remains to vital to our understanding of today too. Freedom for Palestine has been one of the causes that Philosophy Football has actively backed with T-shirts fundraising, promotion and events, marked this Christmas with our Palestine Eagle shirt.

A superbly dissenting account of an earlier era of resistance and rebellion is provided by the late Lucio Magri's Tailor of Ulm:Communism in the Twentieth Century. While Lenin's contribution to football tactics as recounted on our Lenin shirt remain somewhat tenuous, the Eurocommunist tradition, best exemplified by Gramsci, has helped more than any other the understanding of the centrality of changes in popular culture to any revolutionary project. Magri tells of the successes and failures of Italian Communism towards that end with a literary turn sadly almost entirely absent from writing on the English Left.

For visual inspiration ,Philosophy Football designer Hugh Tisdale draws on an incredible range of sources. The year of protest has thrown up an impressive range of posters, home-made placards and street art. Much of this bears more than a passing resemblance to the imagery from another epic moment of protest, Paris, May ‘68 It is a visual legacy wonderfully depicted in Beauty is in the Street: A Visual Record of the May '68 Paris Uprising, edited by Johan Kugelberg with Philippe Vermés. This is more, much more than simply an arty coffee-book, it is a manual of how to produce a revolutionary art that is eye-catching and engaging as well as angry and direct. One of the contemporary visual influences influences on the 2011 generation of protest has been the graphic novel, hence the widely worn V for Vendetta masks from Alan Moore’s graphic novel of the same name. And its a two-way process too, with political graphic novels catching on too. One of the latest is Robin Hood : People’s Outlaw and Forest Hero by Paul Buhle. Comic-strip style, Buhle quite rightly places the iconically English tale of Robin Hood in a tradition of rebel banditry against the rich and the powerful.

Football of course is never very far from our minds. The Champions League final this year was one of those rare occasions when everyone watching, perhaps even the most die-hard Manchester Red, could sit back and enjoy Barcelona playing the most sublime football we are ever likely to see, the 'beautiful game' indeed. And much the same goes for the European and and World Champions, with Barca providing the core of the all-conquering Spanish team (except of course for their 1-0 defeat by England of course!). Phil Ball's now updated Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football is the kind of book that uncovers what football can tell us about a nation's culture, history and politics. The well-deserved winner of the 2011 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke by Ronald Reng in a painfully different way also makes the kind of connection between football and life that creates the best kind of book about our game. Tragically topical with Gary Speed's incredibly sad loss, Ronald Reng's emotionally powerful book tells the true story of a gifted young German goalkeeper and what drove him to suicide. There has been a glut of Brian Clough biographies in recent years, plus the fictionalised account provided by David Peace’s superb The Damned United . Now Jonathan Wilson has produced another, Brian Clough: Nobody Ever Says Thankyou. Jonathan has made his reputation as a highly original football writer with a series of books displaying a healthy, and rare, obsession with tactics. His Clough book benefits from this near unique approach. Clough was such a huge personality it is too easy to ignore the magnitude of his achievements, first with Derby County then Nottingham Forest. The question every England fan should be asking by the time they’ve finished this book is where would English football be now if Clough had been given the job as England manager he so obviously should have been given. Next year will be the 20th anniversary of Fever Pitch being published, a book that sparked a wave of fan confessional books. My half of Philosophy Football has recently moved to Lewes in East Sussex and fallen in love with the non-league game, almost entirely detached from the over-hyped corporate junket the Premiership has become. Twenty years after Hornby, my now local club Lewes FC have inspired its own fan confessional, in the shape of Stuart Fuller's diary of a season Dripping Yarns. A great read about the kind of games where fans can, and do, change ends at half-time!

In 2012 of course football will be competing for sporting attention with the London Olympics. With the earliest England might now host the World Cup 2026, this represents the biggest domestic sporting event most of us will witness in our lifetimes. A comprehensive critical preview is provided by the an admirably accessible collection of academic essays Watching the Olympics: Politics, Power and Representation edited by John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson. The book ranges over the meaning of Olympism, the securitisation of the Games, sports nationalism and plenty more. When Philosophy Football started out back in 1994 there were some authors who kind of defined the kind of fan culture we aspired to help create, Simon Inglis was cetainly one of these with his writing on Football Stadiums, and we’re pleased to say Simon has taken part in a number of the events we organise. For the past few years he has been involved in a fascinating project, publishing superbly illustrated books about Britain’s sporting architectural heritage. The latest is The British Olympics: Britain’s Olympic Heritage 1612-2012 by Martin Polley. Going back to the London 1908 and 1948 Games to find out whatever happened to the buildings constructed and sites used, but also further back to an early pre-modern British celebration of the Greek Olympian myth. With stunning photos, this book is a kind of alternative route map to follow as the 2012 extravaganza threatens to engulf us all. In Olympic history the moment when John Carlos and Tommy Smith raised their fists in Black Power salutes at the Mexico 1968 Games of course remains one of the most memorable images not just of the Olympics, but the 1960s Civil Rights Movement as well. Dave Zirin’s The John Carlos Story is co-written with John Carlos, it is a moving account of the circumstances which led to the podium protest, its enduring relevance and the struggles against racism it has helped to inspire too. Read it before writing off sport as an arena to not only confirm ideas, but contest them as well.

The Philosophy Football seasonal bookshelf is defiantly eclectic. But if anyone still doesn't believe much of this has anything to do with football, and football has nothing to do with anything beyond the touchline then the words of a figure of towering significance in Lucio Magri's book on Italian communism will have to do their best to convince. " Football is a model of individualistic society. It demands initiative, competition and conflict. But it is regulated by the unwritten rule of fair play." Antonio Gramsci