Cricket and its literary representations, Anthony Bateman argues in this provocative, perplexing, and problematic work, have always possessed “an inescapably political subtext” (11). The fusion of literary analysis and trenchant insights into the manner in which cultural matters such as cricket not only come to represent a particular vision of national identity but also are very much part of its construction makes this book of significant value. At its heart is the question of Englishness, an identity that, in this age of devolution and resurgent Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish independence of purpose, has sought to escape the confines of the British-English synonymy, and this book has perfect timing to register its claims in that debate. Its ambitious attempt to explore the relationship between Englishness and cricket is also its downfall. Bateman all too easily falls into the trap of readily and simply equating Englishness and England with Britishness and Britain. Wales, for example, does not exist in this book, Scotland barely registers, and, for all the attempts to explore England's relationship with the colonies of the Empire, the deeply problematic and divisive interplay between Ireland and Great Britain is batted away in a few short pages of literary analysis of the works of James Joyce.

A broader view of British literary representations of cricket lends much weight to Bateman's central point about the political subtext, but his failure to register the complexities of Britishness means that they are ignored. To bring a Welsh example: the most famous literary representation of mining life in Wales written by a miner is Bert Lewis Coombes's These Poor Hands (London, 1939). In the course of the 1921 strike Coombes tells of the coming together of striking miners in the village to build for themselves a playing field—not for rugby football, not for soccer, but for cricket. This brief example demonstrates that cricket was not a purely English game nor were its literary representations exclusively converging on notions of Englishness and the English nation. So, it is fundamental in any work that claims as its topic the relationship between a cultural object and Anglo-British national identity that it should pay some respect for the bits of Britain that are not Anglo.

There are, of course, fascinating insights that emerge from the literary approach Bateman adopts. He is at his best when examining the interplay between cricket seen as a symbol of a settled national identity with its green and pleasant lands and other sports such as boxing, soccer, and rugby, which were employed by artists and writers as symbols of modernity (80). The examination of the contested nature of Englishness in the period after the Great War is the highlight of the book. Focusing on gender and sexuality, Bateman's apposite treatment of Woolf and Forster underscores the politics surrounding cricket's adoption and adaptation as the quintessential English motif. Virginia Woolf, Bateman notes, employs cricket in her experimental novel, The Waves (1931), to highlight “an elitist, and dangerously complacent, ideal of imperial manliness” (84). The distance of women and gay men from imperial normatives linked to sport is an important step forward for the historiography despite recent moves by some to render gender obsolete (see Susan Bandy's chapter in the Routledge Companion to Sports History [London, 2010], 129–47).

Bateman's analysis of class is less convincing because, while the middle class loom large in this book, the working class appear almost as spectators in the process of the construction of Englishness through cricket. He notes, for example, Thomas Hughes's claims that games such as cricket were ideal arenas for cross-class encounter and that the Trades Union Congress used cricket imagery in its propaganda concluding that “by dint of its unimpeachable Englishness, cricket seems to have had a unique ability amongst sports to transcend party-political lines” (89). Yes, cricket crossed party-political lines, but it was not by dint of its Englishness but rather its communalism—a point well made recently by Andrew Hignell in his Cricket in Wales (Cardiff, 2009, 73). Working-class appropriation of sport and its adaptation of middle-class virtues of respectability were not as straightforward as Bateman suggests.

Imperialism, which occupies the second half of the book, is explored through the writings of the noted Marxist critic C. L. R. James and the challenges to English imperial constructions of manliness and the imperial mission laid down by Australia and particularly India and the West Indies. Cricket occupied a place in the canon of the imperial elite as evidence of the civilized nature of the colonizer compared to the colonized, but it was also an important conduit for the transformation of the colonized into “English gentlemen” (121–22). In those parts of the Empire cricket underwent revision, becoming, as with other imperial sports such as rugby football, an important articulation of the reverse relationship between colony and “Mother” country—a point that is forcefully registered in Bateman's conclusion (197). The destabilizing of empire to which Bateman's subtitle refers doubles back on itself with the appropriation of cricket by, for example, India to symbolize that nation in the postcolonial age, and this book serves as a useful waypoint in exploring those trends.

In sum, here is a valuable contribution to the field whether it be sports history, the history of cricket, or literary studies. Its importance lies in its juxtaposition of these three, but it nevertheless leaves this reader frustrated by its obscuring so much of the complexity of national identity.