England and Eternity

Cricket is the strangest game. It features idealism, brutality, low comedy, high intelligence, luck and sheer bravery in equal measure – and often achieves the condition of art.

Declan Kiberd's remarkable book is a celebration of cricket through the ages of the oddities of the people who love and play it, and he evokes brilliantly what it is like to be 'out there' on the field of play.

Although the modern game is rooted in the gentle rural England described by L.P. Hartley and George Orwell, it has in its more modern versions come to reflect the industrial power and intermittent violence of modern life.

England and Eternity is a teasing but affectionate study of the genius of the English people as seen from a postcolonial perspective – and of the game which, along with Shakespeare and Houses of Parliament, was one of their richest, strangest and most lasting gifts to the wider world.