Robert Chesshyre

Notepads & Thighpads

The Authors XI: A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon

By

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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