Golden Ages at the Fenner's Margin

On the face of it, combining Cambridge, cricket and the economics of John Maynard Keynes is a bit like trying to write about Beethoven and banana milkshake. There is scant evidence that Keynes showed much interest in the game, certainly after he moved from his boyhood home within a beefy hit of Fenner's, the Cambridge University ground.

But then Adrian Wykes, who has produced a charmingly eccentric book, is an unusual author. A former economics teacher, he must be the only man to have both dismissed Steve Waugh and released an LP under the name Percy Pavilion (which included the number Gower Power).

His book is split in two. First comes a diary, supposedly by Keynes's father, which tries to translate economics into cricketing terms. (Very imaginative, though Keynes's biographer, Lord Skidelsky doesn't think it quite comes off.) Then, in a series of essays written in the voice of Keynes Jr, Wykes explores Victorian Cambridge, where Keynes Sr was a don and Jack Hobbs's father a poor college servant. Along the way he takes in the novels of Virginia Woolf, lawnmowers and monetary union in Europe.

The end result is a little like a good winter's walk in the country. A reader can get snagged in some of the denser economic thicket, but it is worth persevering. Wykes, a former Cambridgeshire cap, certainly understands cricketers; about bowlers he writes of the "desperate balance, the tiny margin for error, the risk involved in any ambition to be more than averagely effective" - a feeling familiar to every club dobber contemplating a more exotic delivery.

There are also many interesting sights along the way: the young Hobbs practising with cabbage stalks and Brussels sprouts, the Victorian `Catapulta' bowling machine, the bewhiskered 1878 Cambridge town side that could claim to be world champions ... And, like on our winter walk, the reader is left with a warm glow. It comes partly from Wykes's radiant enthusiasm, and partly from the reassuring knowledge that publishers are interested in books as passionate and peculiar as this one.