Cricket

A truly great Ashes series leaves a glow in the memory that is forever golden. The greatest of all took place ten years ago, and gripped the nation in a way that cricket has never […]

The Vatican is not traditionally known as a hotbed of cricketing talent, so a team in holy orders shouldn’t prove too much for a touring XI of authors from the UK, should it? Not so, […]

The summer of 1912 was one of the wettest on record. Month after month, rain lashed the cricket pitches of England. Sydney Barnes, whose 69 wickets came that season at a cost of just over […]

What can the England captain teach an amateur cricketer most recently humiliated by a teenage leg-spinner?   Read the full article on the Financial Times website

For historian and hopeless sportsman Tom Holland, cricket meant ‘tedium, interspersed with the odd moment of raw terror’. Until the day he watched Botham’s Ashes heroics and was utterly converted.   Read the full article […]

In this extract from The Nightwatchman, historian Tom Holland contends that, amid all the tawdry tattle, it is worth remembering the times Pietersen had us marvelling at his brilliance.   Read the full article on […]

There can be a strong strain of self-parody in even the greatest commentators. When Henry Blofeld describes the progress of a pigeon in his inimitably plummy tones, or greets a visiting Ocker to the commentary […]

The American series “30 Rock” has been airing in the U.K. for several years now, and most of it carries perfectly well across the pond. But comedy depends on context, and I was surely not […]