Monday, January 14, 2019

Mike Brearley On Cricket and the joy of a good index

I love a good index, and Mike Brearley's willingness to bring his wider intellectual interests into his cricket writing gave me high hopes for his new collection On Cricket.

And I was not disappointed. Because it features such juxtapositions as:

Barrington, Ken
Bartók, Béla

Fowler, Graeme
Freud, Sigmund

Hogg, Quintin
Hogg, Rodney

idée fixe
Illingworth, Ray

Pietersen, Kevin
Pinter, Harold

Sutherland, Joan
Swann, Graeme

Verity, Hedley
Virgil, The Aeneid

Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Woakes, Chris

If you like good indexes too, I can also recommend Electric Eden.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

When flogging a 1988 edition 33 volume Encyclopedia Britannica, I was struck by the index titles on the spines - they had no "From" or "To" - and included Accounting Architecture, Chicago Death, Decorative Edison, Excretion Geometry, Geomorphic Immunity, Number Prague, PreColumbian Sacred, and United Zoroastrianism. Dubious academic fields and forgotten punk bands....