Neville Cardus was a literary writer whose subject happened to be cricket, and here is a representative selection of the best of Cardus’s writing on the sport. Included are the imaginative reconstruction of the 1882 England and Australia test match to Cardus’s descriptions of village cricket, accounts of the great players that Cardus watched play (from Donald Bradman and Harold Larwood to Wally Hammond) to examples of his ‘Shastbury’ writings.