Surely the most sought after among what Lord David Cecil described as ‘The Pleasures of Reading’ (a lecture title that lured John Betjeman in the expectation of a paean to the architectural delights of Berkshire’s county town) is the moment when an author articulates a feeling that you imagined was peculiar to yourself, expresses an emotion that you have carefully suppressed. In Michael Simkins’s extremely enjoyable memoir of his lifelong obsession with the ‘summer game’, this moment occurred on the very first page where he confesses to constantly making the evocative sound of a cricket ball hitting a bat. Having practised the same strange habit (‘like some sporting Tourette’s sufferer’) since boyhood myself, this was literally the click of recognition.
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