Ronnie O’Sullivan was in primary school when his father gave him his first proper snooker cue. It was a beauty: a Burwat Champion, made by the company that once supplied Queen Victoria with a snooker table. The cue was second-hand, but Ronnie Sr knew that it — like his son — was special. “The only way he managed to persuade the geezer who owned it to hand it over was giving him a car in return,” O’Sullivan writes.

Perspective. I used to zoom in and it would be all catastrophic, now I zoom out and get a bit of perspective. O’Sullivan has been described as “the most naturally gifted player ever”. He was potting balls from age seven and had scored his first century by 10, beating all in his wake before turning professional at 16. O’Sullivan fell short in his bid to win an eighth world title last month, losing in the quarter-finals to eventual champion Luca Brecel. O’Sullivan is candid when detailing the struggles with which both “Snooker Ronnie” and the tea-loving, scone-scoffing “Ordinary Ronnie” have contended. He writes about how both his parents were imprisoned while he was still a teenager, his own time as a distant father and his spell in rehab. This rationalist, therapeutic approach – which he owes to his time with the psychiatrist Steve Peters – is also evident in O’Sullivan’s treatment of his iconic sporting moments, such as his tightly contested World Championship semi-final against John Higgins in 2022, which O’Sullivan won, going on to claim his seventh title. Unbreakable provides a fascinating insight into the fortitude and fragility of an elite sportsperson’s mind. Besides quite a few laughs, many readers will find recognition, reassurance, remedy and revelation in O'Sullivan's candid story. I highly recommend it.' - THE TIMESNew music can be a tough sell, as Birmingham Contemporary Music Group found when only a handful of... ★★★★☆ Ronnie O’Sullivan is planning to skip UK tournaments to concentrate on playing in Asia. The seven-time world champion has swung between preferring to play at home and abroad and, in an interview on TalkSport to promote his new autobiography, Unbreakable, O’Sullivan said he is now looking to travel more. Unfortunately for Francisco Garcia, last year the BBC ran a documentary and a podcast series revisiting the case, and so there is little in We All Go into the Dark that feels truly new: reclaiming the stories of the victims; the 1996 exhumation of the suspect John McInnes for DNA testing (spoiler: it wasn’t him); the possibility that Bible John was actually the serial killer Peter Tobin (a theory here discredited by the detective who caught Tobin). Most interesting are Garcia’s interviews with those directly involved in the case over the decades – crime reporters, detectives, a pathologist – and the underlying social history of how bogeymen come to be. I got falsely accused of a kidnapping when I was 17 or 18. It was scary: they took me and my mate in separately, strip-searched me, took my car away for forensics, put me in a white paper suit. I was like: “What’s going on here?”

I said, ‘I feel guilty sometimes for just enjoying the game, because I know it takes something away from being a winner. But if I tried to be a winner, I think I just wouldn't want to play anymore because it's too stressful at my age.’ He went, ‘you're doing the right thing. If you can just enjoy it and have fun.’” Scottish Business Digest Serica could revive North Sea’s Kyle oil field: 5 need-to-know business storiesI’ve not mellowed, in that I’ve changed my personality, but I’ve learned to just not take myself too seriously. I’m much more philosophical.”

At 47, he’s been at the top of his game for longer than many of his peers. Yet it wasn’t an easy start for the former ‘bad boy’ of snooker, given his family history (his father was jailed for murder when O’Sullivan was 16) and his battles with drugs, alcohol and depression. Reaching a new stage in his snooker career, Ronnie admitted his love of the game, and his incredible talent, is beginning to outweighing his need to win. In the new tome, Ronnie writes about his 31-year career, from being a teenage snooker prodigy and winning titles within a year of turning professional to becoming the greatest snooker player of all time and breaking world records.The deaths of innumerable indigenous Americans from infections brought by the first European colonists left the newcomers short of cheap labour, he notes, In one of the longest interviews he ever gave, the Friends actor confided that he was ‘a dark soul’ who dreamed of meeting the right woman and starting a family Raised in Essex, O’Sullivan, 47, won his first UK Championship at the age of 17. He is regarded as the greatest snooker player of all time, having won seven world, seven Masters and seven UK titles. He is currently the world No 1. He published his first autobiography, Ronnie, in 2003; his latest, Unbreakable, has just been released. He lives in Essex with actor Laila Rouass and has three children.

Ronnie is searingly honest, candidly funny, and thought provokingly brilliant in Unbreakable. I devoured it.' - NIHAL ARTHANAYAKE Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops Now it feels a lot better: everyone is just in a better place. I just want to see her and her daughter [Rouass has a teenage daughter from a previous relationship] and her family, who are like my family, happy.” In the book, he says his worst times were between 1994-2000 and that rehab and running saved him, while the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Steps programme and a good sports psychiatrist have also helped. Neil Parish is the Tory who was caught watching porn in the Commons. Now he stars in Channel 4’s Banged Up

For much of 1983 and 1984, Frankie Goes to Hollywood dominated the pop landscape so totally that... ★★★★✩ Brian Eno has just won the Golden Lion for music at the Venice Biennale, which obliged him to perform with an orchestra. Anyone expecting classical conformity from this boffin of sound, however, hasn’t been paying attention for the past... ★★★★☆ I put a lot of work into it,” he shared. “Obviously when you do a book, you want it to be authentic and people have got to read it, so we wanted to do the best job we and Tom did, we put our heart and soul into it.”