With James Holland and Shehan KarunatilakaAv The Nightwatchman Podcast

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A special LIVE edition of The Nightwatchman Podcast recorded at the central London offices of our sponsors, Rathbones. Host Jon Hotten is joined by acclaimed writers (and amateur cricketers) Sebastian Faulks and Tom Holland for a discussion about all things cricketing and literary.Av The Nightwatchman Podcast

Guest: Michael Atherton Jon talks to Michael Atherton, a man who has held two of the great offices of the game, that of England men’s captain and cricket correspondent of the Times, a unique double, and one that he rounds off as one of Sky’s commentators. Plenty of former players jump across into media, but it’s hard to think of any since perhaps R…

Guest: Mike Brearley Jon talks to Mike Brearley about whether there is there such a thing as the spirit of cricket? After all, if the spirit of cricket exists in our physical world, it is as a single paragraph that prefaces the current edition of the Laws of the game. And from its inception, cricket seems to have been open to different moral interp…

Guests: Scyld Berry and David Woodhouse We tend to take the concept of the tour for granted, yet is it not one of cricket’s strangest phenomena? Devised on Victorian timescales of months at sea followed by a lengthy navigation of distant lands, the notion feels increasingly at odds with modern life. So bound up is cricket with travel that the centr…

Guests: With Tanya Aldred and Vithushan Ehantharajah Twitter began in 2006. By 2007, it was hosting 400,000 tweets per quarter. A year later it was 100m. A year after that, it was fifty million per day, and sometimes, if Tendulkar was batting perhaps, a million or so of those were about cricket. Twitter, instagram, the over by over news reports and…

Guests: Daniel Norcross and Isabelle Westbury Long before the game was written about it’s safe to say it was talked about. There’s something about cricket’s ruminative spaces that allows room for language, and the language through which we understand the game grew as it was spoken about on radio and written about in newspapers and books. It’s very …

Guests: Gideon Haigh, Mark Ramprakash and B3 bat-maker Michael Blatherwick The symbiotic relationship between batter and bat is perhaps not surprising – in a team game, the batter stands alone, and the bat is all they have to hold on to. We’ll investigate how its simple shape, unchanged for a hundred years, has become objectified, turned into epic …

Guests: Marcus Berkman, Sam Perry and Tim Key In November 1970, Fred Trueman, newly retired from first class cricket, appeared in Dad’s Army. The episode was called The Test, and Trueman was, somewhat predictably, cast as the demon fast bowler EC Egan, recruited by Warden Hodges for a grudge match against Captain Mainwaring’s Home Guard. The joy of…

Guests: Tom Holland, Osman Samiuddin and Jarrod Kimber Is cricket mysterious? Well its origins are. We sort of know where it comes from – trap ball and stick ball and other games of the middle ages. And people have been hitting things with sticks since time began. Jon and guests dig into the mysterious origins of the game and also discuss other top…