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Born in Lancashire, MICHAEL HENDERSON has written for the Guardian, Observer, The Times and Daily Mail, and was cricket correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. He writes regularly about the arts for the Spectator and New Statesman, and about cricket for The Cricketer. He lives in London.
Absolutely and completely loved this book by Michael Henderson -
love letter, memoir, lament, polemic. Read, in place of cricket
*Marina Hyde*
Michael Henderson is one of the most knowledgeable writers there is
about the summer game. In this vibrant chronicle of the 2019
cricket season, he travels around England taking the temperature of
the sport he loves. The result is pure gold . . . The book is also
a love poem to an England fast disappearing . . . For those who
fear the worst for the sport they love, this is like cool, clear
water for a man dying of thirst. It's barnstorming, coruscating
stuff, and as fine a book about the game as you'll read for
years
*Mail on Sunday*
Philip Larkin's line "that will be England gone" is the premise of
this fascinating book which is about music, literature, poetry and
films as well as cricket. Henderson is that rare bird, a reporter
with a fine grasp of time and place, but also a stylist of enviable
quality and perception
*Michael Parkinson*
Admirers of Neville Cardus and A. E. Housman will warm to Michael
Henderson's elegy for an ideal England. A rich roast dinner of
cricket, music, topography, nostalgia and anecdote, washed down
with prose as smooth and satisfying as a pint of Otter Ale
*Sebastian Faulks*
Charming . . . a threnody for a vanished and possibly mythical
England
*Sunday Times*
Lyrical . . . [Henderson's] pen is filled with the romantic spirit
of the great Neville Cardus . . . This
book is an extended love letter, a beautifully written one, to a
world that he is desperate to keep alive for
others to discover and share. Not just his love of cricket, either,
but of poetry and classical music and fine
cinema . . . A book that started out as an elegy for a changing
game seems more poignant now
*The Times*
To those who love both cricket and the context in which it is
played, the book is rather wonderful, and moving
*Daily Telegraph*
It is about cricket but also about much more: landscape, place,
poetry, music, national mythology . . . This is the book's
authentic register, and it is haunted by loss
*New Statesman*
Englishness itself, as much as cricket, is the main theme of
Michael Henderson's genre-melding That Will Be England Gone . . .
extremely readable . . . often amusing . . . That Will be England
Gone is part memoir, part sports book, part essay . . . Given that
this may be a summer without leather and willow, and that coughing
has become taboo, Henderson's book provides a much-needed
literary-cricketing alternative: a beautiful clearing of the
throat
*Spectator*
In a work that now seems improbably prescient, that same sense of
gazing at a disappearing world has been articulated with great
skill and, most of all, great affection by Michael Henderson . . .
The book - a paean to the sub-culture of county cricket, its
supporters, its players, its observers, its writers, its pubs and
its arenas - was completed before the coronavirus crisis struck but
its premise seems more pertinent than
ever
*Mail on Sunday*
A travelogue and a love letter to the festival and spa towns of
England and in particular to the places where county cricket is
played . . . Henderson writes beautifully about Cheltenham and
Chesterfield and Trent Bridge in Nottingham, his favourite Test
ground. You do not need to love cricket to feel the point
*The Times*
One of my favourite writers about cricket
*Daily Mail*
Beautifully written piece of work . . . wonderful book - not just a
sports book, which is why it is so good - is to be reminded, or
even educated, of what it means to be English and of England's
history
*Yorkshire Post*
All good sports books are about more than just sport, and this
anti-modern elegy to an old rural England takes in countless
bypaths from Vienna to Ken Dodd . . . Erudite and occasionally
beautiful
*Financial Times*
Erudite . . . genuinely beautiful
*Wisden Cricket Monthly*
It would perhaps be a mistake to regard this as purely a cricket
book. Each excursion to a cricket ground is preceded and
accompanied by extensive digressions elsewhere. But the digressions
are not wandering from the point, but carefully crafted
scene-setting as Henderson provides the social, artistic and
historical context for the cricket he witnesses. Rather than purely
a cricket book, this is an elegy for a vanishing world with cricket
as its framework
*The Journal of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and
Historians*
Wonderful elegy to a game that, way more than any other, defines
our shared identity . . . a timely reminder
of what is missing from our lives in cricket's absence
*The Oldie*
Henderson has a gift for the telling phrase and illuminating
anecdote
*New Statesman*
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