Each excursion to a cricket ground is preceded and accompanied by extensive digressions elsewhere. But the digressions are not wandering from the point, but carefully crafted scene-setting as Henderson provides the social, artistic and historical context for the cricket he witnesses. Rather than purely a cricket book, this is an elegy for a vanishing world with cricket as its framework -- Richard Lawrence * The Journal of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians * Erudite . . . genuinely beautiful * Wisden Cricket Monthly *.