Sweet Summers: The Classic Cricket Writing of JM Kilburn

An evocative new book 'Sweet Summers: The Classic Cricket Writing of JM Kilburn' (Great Northern Books) edited by award winning writer, Duncan Hamilton, with an introduction by Geoffrey Boycott, captures a time when the true spirit of cricket existed.

"JM Kilburn was one of cricket's major romantic poets: the Coleridge to Neville Cardus' Wordsworth." Duncan Hamilton

"He was the very best of cricket writers." Dickie Bird

"Nowadays, I believe there are too many writers attached to cricket who know bugger all about it - Jim was different." Geoffrey Boycott

For more than forty summers, from 1934 to 1976, J M Kilburn's authoritative and elegant essays on cricket, captured the beauty of the game and the legends gracing it, among them Donald Bradman, Fred Trueman, Jack Hobbs, Keith Miller, Garfield Sobers, Hedley Verity and Walter Hammond. He writes of the days when 8,000 people watched Yorkshire's County Championship matches; when he travelled by ship on an Ashes tour with his friend Len Hutton; and of a bygone but beautiful period when one-day matches, coloured clothing and rampant commercialism in cricket simply didn't exist.

The scent of those long-lost 'sweet summers' is found in this new book: a collection of Kilburn's writings from the Yorkshire Post, Wisden and The Cricketer as well as his ten published books including 'In Search of Cricket'. Expertly compiled by Duncan Hamilton (author of the 2007 William Hill award winning book 'Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough') this book is perfectly timed as present-day cricket stumbles from one controversy to the next. In addition to Kilburn's cultivated and insightful words, the book also contains 42 superb archive images.

Duncan Hamilton says, 'Kilburn is worth reading not only because he was a knowledgeable and respected interpreter of cricket - well balanced, tough-minded and scrupulously honest in his verdicts - but also for the valuable historical and social perspective that reading him provides. Most of all he demonstrably cared about cricket. His heart was in it - and belonged to it.'

Geoffrey Boycott, has provided the introduction to the book, in which he says, 'When I was growing up in Fitzwilliam, television didn't dominate cricket in the way it does today. Even radio coverage of it was spasmodic. If I wanted to know what was happening at Headingley, I turned to the Bible of Yorkshire cricket - the Yorkshire Post and Jim's report, which was read like scripture throughout the county'. Later as a player, Boycott came to know Kilburn well and respected his judgement and his integrity, explaining: 'Jim was someone I could trust implicitly. Later on in my career, as the desire for tabloid scandal profoundly altered the relationship between journalists and players, I was always wary about talking to reporters who I didn't know. You could find something you'd said - usually innocuously or half in jest - either grossly inflated or ripped out of context and then spread across the back pages in huge dark type. Jim was different.'

The book also contains contributions from other leading cricket writers, commentators and legendary players including Dickie Bird, Richie Benaud, Richard Hutton, John Woodcock, Matthew Engel, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Geoffrey Moorhouse, David Frith, Derek Hodgson, Brian Close, Ray Illingworth, Stephen Chalke, Harry Gration, Chris Waters, Bob Appleyard and Don Wilson.

'Sweet Summers: The Classic Cricket Writing of JM Kilburn' edited by Duncan Hamilton, introduction by Geoffrey Boycott.

Hardback, £16.99, published by Great Northern Books - telephone 01274 735056 or go to www.greatnorthernbooks.co.uk.