Robert Chesshyre
Notepads & Thighpads
The Authors XI: A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon
By The Authors Cricket Club
Bloomsbury 226pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Occasional cricketers and writers, as Sebastian Faulks points out in his introduction to this evocative collection of cricket memories, have much in common: they ‘tend to be vain, anecdotal, passionate, knowledgeable, neurotic and given to fantasy’. In other words cricket and writing constitute a marriage made in heaven.
In 1913, a celebrated team of author cricketers – including Arthur Conan Doyle and P G Wodehouse – played their final game. Last summer modern authors joined forces to re-establish a team of authors. No literary giants this time,
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