Cricket Ball: The Heart of the Game
by Gary Cox
(Bloomsbury 2018, Hardback £20)

ACCORDING to Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre is reputed to have been impressed by Raymond Aron’s remark that one could look at an apricot cocktail and make philosophy out of it.

Gary Cox — himself the author of a number of books on Sartre and existentialism — doesn’t try to make a phenomenological treatise like Being and Nothingness out of a cricket ball, but he does use it very effectively as a prop for opening up “many new ways of thinking about the infinite cricket universe.”