For this collection of essays, celebrated cricket writer Mike Brearley has gone through pieces he has written over the past four decades, elaborating on many of them, cutting or adding, according to his second thoughts presenting to the reader something that is more holistic, more synoptic, from distance and old age. The portraits range from profiles of individuals (everyone from Jardine and Bradman to Alastair Cook and Ian Chappell) to profiles of hot issues such as race, prejudice and depression. Brearley touches on everything from a Socratic enquiry into the nature of sport to the relationship between sport and psychoanalysis.