The Best Loved Game

Geoffrey Moorhouse has been described as "one of the best writers of our time" (Byron Rogers, The Times), "a brilliant historian" (Dirk Bogarde, Daily Telegraph) and "a writer whose gifts are beyond" category" (Jan Morris, Independent on Sunday). His numerous books -- travel narratives, histories, novels and sporting prints -- have won prizes and been translated into several languages: To the Frontier won the Thomas Cook Award for the best travel book of its year. In 1982 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2006 he became Hon DLitt of the University of Warwick. He has recently concentrated on Tudor history, notably with The Pilgrimage of Grace and, in 2005, Great Harry's Navy, which has just been followed by The Last Office: 1539 and the Dissolution of a Monastery. Born in Lancashire, he has lived in a hill village in North Yorkshire for many years.

Destined to rest beside the finest works of this nature in the library of cricket, the author spent the summer of 1978 sampling cricket at every level: from Eton v Harrow to the Lancashire League; and from Cambridge undergraduates getting a lesson from Zaheer Abbas to Ian Botham excelling with bat and ball at Lord's.