I’ve got an absolutely shameful admission. My great friend, James Healy, who I’ve shared political and sporting gossip with since we were university students, sent me, I think as a joke, Sarah Vine’s How Not to be a Political Wife. I’m almost ashamed to say I found it completely unputdownable, and read in a single sitting. I do have a taste for political biography anyway so I’ve been quite enjoying the recent raft of books chronicling the gradual decay of the last government. I managed to work my way through Simon Hart’s Ungovernable. The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip in no time at all, and Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge. It’s almost an entire sub-genre: the decay of the 2010 to 2024 Conservative Party which has been very entertaining. 

The current audiobook I was put onto by a friend in horse racing who knew I loved cricket is Stephen Fay and David Kynaston’s Arlott, Swanton and the Soul of English Cricket, the sort of twin and contrasting voices of cricket from the post war period up to the 1970s. It’s really delightfully esoteric and way more absorbing than you might think, or than it sounds. As someone who made a career in sports broadcasting, it tells you how different the golden age was in terms of opportunity and, in some cases, remuneration. 

[E.W “Jim”] Swanton was correspondent for the Evening Standard when he was about 23 and became this incredible negotiator of his own career. He was the sort of patrician voice and [John] Arlott was obviously a very different voice from the ones that were heard on the radio when the idea that you could have regional accents on the BBC was completely unheard of. There’s no point having an audiobook unless the narrator can bring it out of the page especially if you’re on a very long plane or car journey which I take a lot. Mark Meadows narrates it. It’s brilliant, it’s absolutely superb. The level of concentration it must require for him to sustain all the kind of quoted passages of Arlott is absolutely phenomenal. It sounds dry but it’s far from it. Really, it’s a social history as well as talking about the game. It was a bit of a surprise.

The Nick Luck Daily Podcast is one of the finest horse racing podcasts around, have a listen by clicking the link below.