Over and out?

Cricket writing, in the age of professionalism, affords less room to dreamy scribes. Fact and revelation are preferred to style and reflection. The roaming tour diary is rare, ghosted autobiographies rife. There are notable exceptions, of course, and we can happily toss Duncan Hamilton among them.

Hamilton is on a roll. He has won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year twice, in 2007 and 2009, the latter for his biography of Harold Larwood, chief executioner — and victim — of the infamous Bodyline tactic used to nullify Don Bradman’s Australians in 1932-33. The Larwood book cracks along at a hurtling pace; A Last English Summer, set to the beat of the 2009 season, is a much more personal and contemplative read, which escapes woolly romanticism by the style of its delivery, every bit as crisp as the sound of a new leather ball on a willow bat.

Each chapter takes Hamilton to another setting, from Lord’s to Acre Bottom, home of the Lancashire League club, Ramsbottom. His eyes are sometimes on the cricket, sometimes gazing to the uncertain future, sometimes straining to see the scene of eras gone. Present merges with past. Is that the Sri Lankan Angelo Mathews, performing a piece of unimaginable fielding on the Trent Bridge boundary, or W. G. Grace, posing for a photo with the England XI in what would be his last Test match?

Neville Cardus himself is accused of sentimentality, and at times Hamilton sails close to the wind. The prose is unashamedly rich, calling upon those writers — R. C. Robertson-Glasgow, John Arlott, J. M. Kilburn and Alan Ross — whose spirits course through this book. Literary references abound, from Shakespeare to Chekhov to Beckett. Certainly you will need to accept that cricket is more than a game of bat and ball.