The source of this delight lay partly in Robinson’s deep historical knowledge of. the game and its players. This selection, for example, ranges from a fine analysis of D.W. Gregory, Australia’s first cricket captain to an account of a game played before a violent angry crowd who had come to see a WSC ‘Supertest’ in Guyana. Secondly it lay in the immediacy of his narrative style. Here is Lawry batting in Calcutta with ‘three fielders crouched not far from his lean haunches, ready for any misjudgement of Bedi’s left-hand spin’. Or consider: ‘As Gover came up with his long run, all knees and elbows, Donnelly detected the shoulder movement that warned of a coming bouncer’. Surely, the reader here is almost on the field. Then one can turn to the descriptive style and see again the West Indian Spinner Valentine ‘coming around the wicket with four long-bent-kneed strides like Groucho Marx getting into a lift before the door closes.’ Of course, given the volume of Robinson’s output and the need to meet deadlines, at times he slipped. The occasional ball does race across the turf. Now and again it does crash into the fence and at least one in-dipper does destroy a timber-yard. These blemishes must be overlooked in a sporting writer who could note that ‘Arthur Mailey and Clarrie Grimmett were as different as it was possible for two short men to be’. There is perhaps one point, however, which I wish Ray Robinson had explained. Just where did Lindsay Hassett find a dry cleaner one morning in a small town amid the Derbyshire hills in 1938?