In this engaging and well-researched book, Ollie Randall sets out to show how cricket and literature worked in a symbiotic relationship for several groups of writers from the 1880s until the early 1960s. Lasting friendships were made and careers were helped along in the course of matches played in villages around London. It’s a world far removed from the Indian Premier League (IPL), the most colourful, glitzy and successful franchise in the modern game, reflecting how much this seemingly conservative sport has changed in the past century or so. It was only in 1963 that the distinction between amateurs and professionals was abolished in England: all were now to be (poorly) paid. Later, with the arrival of Kerry Packer’s breakaway Australian World Series in the 1970s, administrators realised they had to start giving their players a proper living wage.

The presiding spirit of Randall’s ‘writers in whites’ is the unlikely figure of J M Barrie, who would go on to have huge success with Peter Pan. Randall describes him as ‘hampered by his natural awkwardness’, yet he had a genius for bringing people together and it was in his honour that the team was named the Allahakbarries (in the mistaken belief that ‘Allahu Akbar’ meant ‘Heaven help us’; the team was later renamed the Invalids and then the Authors). Regulars came to include E W Hornung, author of the Raffles books; Jerome K Jerome, who appears to have been a hopeless cricketer; Arthur Conan Doyle, a fine all-rounder who scored a century on his first appearance at Lord’s; and P G Wodehouse, also a handy batsman. Meanwhile, the poet and critic Edmund Blunden captained the Authors XI three times in between teaching stints in East Asia. His love of the game shines in this telling.

Randall draws attention to a division in literature between the ‘highbrows’ (or Modernists) and the ‘middlebrows’, who congregated around the cricket-loving J C Squire, editor of the large-circulation London Mercury and champion of Georgian poetry. When the Allahakbarries visited the Sussex village of Rodmell in 1920, a new local resident,