Acclaimed as a magisterial, classic work, A Social History of English Cricket is an encyclopaedic survey of the game, from its humble origins all the way to modern floodlit finishes. But it is also the story of English culture, mirrored in a sport that has always been a complex repository of our manners, hierarchies and politics. Derek Birley’s survey of the impact on cricket of two world wars, Empire and ‘the English caste system’, will, contends Ian Wooldridge, ‘teach an intelligent child of twelve more about their heritage than he or she will ever pick up at school.’ In just under 400 pages Birley takes us through a rich historical tapestry: how the game was snatched from rustic obscurity by gentlemanly gamblers; became the height of late eighteenth century metropolitan fashion; was turned into both symbol and synonym for British imperialism; and its more recent struggle to dislodge the discomforting social values preserved in the game from its imperial heyday. Superbly witty and humorous, peopled by larger-than-life characters from Denis Compton to Ian Botham, and wholly forswearing nostalgia, A Social History of English Cricket is a tour-de-force by one of the great writers on cricket.

'The Sweetest Rose' traces the history of Yorkshire County Cricket Club over its 150 years, from its birth in Sheffield in January, 1863, right up to the present day.

The Rev Edmund Carter introduced the great Lord Hawke to Yorkshire cricket. Although he played only a handful of first-class matches for Yorkshire, he played the game for Oxford University in the 1860s, in Victoria as a young man, and in West London, before the bulk of his life’s work as a clergyman in the shadow of York Minster.

In 1968, Yorkshire County Cricket Club was the dominant force in English cricket, yet by 1986 it had slid to become one of the game's also-rans. The War of the White Roses tells the story in full from a completely neutral perspective for the first time. With insight from inside the dressing room, committee room, and from the terraces, it tells how two decades of fierce infighting caused so much damage it took almost 30 years to recapture those past glories. The period from 1968 to 1986 was scarred by bitterness, pettiness, and jealousy as civil war broke out with one of the county's greatest-ever players, the brilliant but divisive Geoffrey Boycott, at the center of the story. He is just one of the many interviewees to contribute from both sides of the divide, looking at the personal feuds and political machinations of the period, and examining just how they contributed to the team's fall from grace.