Cricket History

Few sporting records capture the imagination quite like that of the highest individual score in Test cricket. It is the blue riband record of batting achievement, the ultimate statement of stamina and skill. From Charles Bannerman, who scored 165 for Australia against England in the inaugural Test match in 1877, to Brian Lara, who made 400 not out for West Indies against England in 2004, the record has changed hands 10 times.

After entertaining countless radio listeners around the world for decades, who better to convey the breathless drama of a Test match cliffhanger than Henry Blofeld? Now, in Ten to Win...and the Last Man In, he has personally selected 30 matches featuring unforgettable finishes and brought them vividly to life again in his own inimitable way.

The year 1971 was the one that changed Indian cricket forever. Accustomed to seeing a talented but erratic Indian team go from one defeat to another, a stunned cricketing world watched in astonishment as India first beat the West Indies in a Test series on their home turf and then emerged victorious over England - in England. Suddenly, the Indian team had become a force to reckon with. Boria Majumdar and Gautam Bhattacharya's book is a thrilling account of the 1971 twin tours that brings to life the on-field excitement and the backroom drama.

For Michael Parkinson it was never really in doubt that he would spend his life in sport. His father, a fearsome fast bowler himself, indoctrinated young Michael from an early age into the Yorkshire cricket tradition and supporting Barnsley FC. All he ever wanted was to play cricket for Yorkshire and England. My Sporting Life is Sir Michael's love letter to sport, to the heroes and legends of his Yorkshire youth, to the characters of the international games he watched and wrote about, and to the very idea of sport itself.

In 1963, the West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James posed the deceptively benign question: "What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?" A challenge to the public to reconsider cricket and its meaning by placing the game in its true social, political, and economic context. Different Class does not simply challenge the widely accepted orthodoxy of English cricket, it demonstrates how the values and belief systems at its heart were intentionally developed in order to divide the English along class lines at every level of the game.

Following Neville Cardus's assertion that 'there can be no summer in this land without cricket', Hamilton plotted the games he would see in 2019 and wrote down reflectively on some of the cricket that blessed his own sight. It would be captured in the context of the coming season in case subsequent summers and the imminent arrival of the Hundred made that impossible. He would write in the belief that after this season the game might never be quite the same again.