Echoing Greens

'A brilliant book . . . brilliantly written. You really do need to read it' Adrian Chiles<BR><BR>'Mixing the sacred and the profane, high culture and low culture, the sublime and the ridiculous, Deep Pockets is the book this game of unfathomable difficulty and infinite mystery well deserves' Critic <BR><BR>The game of snooker has a remarkable history. From humble origins, it blossomed spectacularly in the 1980s into the nation's most popular sport. Top players became celebrities. The papers were stuffed with snooker scandals. It even conquered the pop charts.<BR><BR><BR>In the twenty-first century, the game is still big news. Along with millions of British fans, a vast audience continues to grow across every corner of the world, from Europe to the Middle East to China. The global thirst for snooker has never been greater.<BR><BR><BR>But - strangely perhaps - snooker's deeper meanings have rarely been explored. It is a game that celebrates subtlety and mystery; a slow undertaking in a fast-paced world. Elegant and profound, snooker invites serious contemplation.<BR><BR><BR>Deep Pockets is a study of this uncharted territory - a love letter to snooker, and an impassioned journey into its soul. Because snooker, in fact, is more than a game. It is a belief set; a way of seeing; an entire philosophical system. In chapters that cover everything from time, truth, loss, luck and more, Deep Pockets explores how snooker can help us to trace the meaning of life itself.

The importance of cricket to the English imagination has been immortalised in the art and literature of a thousand years. It is a story that is known in part, but one that has never been explored in full. And it is lined with surprises, forgotten tales, unnoticed details - ranging from medieval manuscript illustrations, through a dazzling variety of visual art, poetry, fiction, and drama, to recent portraits of contemporary heroes.<BR><BR>Echoing Greens will explore the depth of the bond between cricket and the English imagination. For countless artists and writers across the centuries, the culture and aesthetics of cricket - white-clad players, the crack of bat on ball, booming appeals, admiring applause, figures running up to bowl, batsmen leaning, waiting, swinging the blade - have been as essential to the English landscape as the hills and meadows immortalised by Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. And in pursuing this journey, Echoing Greens will show that - beneath cosy patriotic dreams of 'English values' - a much wilder, more complex story exists. Alongside stories of heroic figures, noble values, and pastoral idylls, the literature and the art of cricket also tell of vice, violence, and scandal. In unveiling the true story behind these representations of the game, this book will also force us to reconsider the history of cricket itself.