Arlott Swanton & Soul English Cricket by the historian David Kynaston and the journalist Stephen Fay, reviewed here by Richard Williams:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/bl...d-cricket-soul
I loved it especially for the fact that it's structured around extracts from their writing but is always comparing them. It's not half a book on Arlott and half on Swanton, and it's not strictly a dual biography but very much a critical analysis from a social history perspective, with Fay's insights as a journalist adding to Kynaston's historical framework.
https://www.amazon.com/Arlott-Swanto.../dp/1408895374
Williams nails it here:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/bl...d-cricket-soul
I loved it especially for the fact that it's structured around extracts from their writing but is always comparing them. It's not half a book on Arlott and half on Swanton, and it's not strictly a dual biography but very much a critical analysis from a social history perspective, with Fay's insights as a journalist adding to Kynaston's historical framework.
https://www.amazon.com/Arlott-Swanto.../dp/1408895374
Williams nails it here:
It would be easy to fall for the caricatures of the chippy liberal and the pompous snob. But Kynaston and Fay look deeper, recognising that if Swanton imagined himself to be, in the words of one exasperated England tour manager, the Lord Protector of English Cricket, while Arlott’s radio audience saw him as a poet laureate of the eternal game, they shared a devotion to its welfare which expressed itself not in a defensive conservatism but in a commitment to changes that both saw as inevitable.
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