THE DOTS WILL NOT BE JOINED is both a rich, sentimental memoir and a racy 'Compendium of Ideas'. It's about sport (mainly football and cricket) but it carries wise, sometimes cheeky diversions - snapshots into what makes us and what liberates us. The *stories* and the challenges range. Rick Walton is a coach and a writer with a fearless, impossibly positive streak coursing through him. He recounts scary or electrifying visits to football and those wonderfully daft adventures so many of us have had in village teams. Combs forgotten in boots; lacerating North Sea gales; chunks of orange and blissfully sweet tea; 'team talks'. But we also have Proper Coaching - notions around how to approach and nourish and support players. There is the contention, too, that sport really can be 'good'; that how we play can matter. All this in a matrix of arty or philosophical hunches which unashamedly (but also humbly) celebrate the raw, The Human, the ridiculous, the unknowable, the 'unweighted'. Walton's book is a one-off, daring to chase a zillion narratives so as to capture something actually rather profound about how activity works, in a world where the 'Social' and Corporate kaleidoscopes are blurring, bending and maybe even crushing our will.

Cricket is a very old game in Scotland - far older than football, a sport which sometimes exercises a baleful, obsessive and deleterious effect on the national psyche. Cricket goes back at least as far as the Jacobite rebellions and their sometimes vicious aftermaths. It is often felt that Scottish cricket underplays itself. It has been portrayed as in some ways an English sport, a "softies" sport, and a sport that has a very limited interest among the general population of Scotland. This is emphatically not true, and this book is in part an attempt to prove that this is a misconception. Sixty-one games (it was going to be just 60, but one turned up at the last minute!) have been chosen from the past 250 years to show that cricket does indeed influence a substantial part of the nation. The matches have been selected at all levels, from Scotland against visiting Australian teams all the way down to a Fife school fixture. These naturally reflect the life, experience and geographical whereabouts of the author. The games are quirky sometimes, (and quirkily chosen) with an emphasis on important events in the broader history of this country, notably the imminence of wars and resumptions at the end of these conflicts. But the important thing is that every single cricket contest does mean an awful lot to some people.

New paperback edition. This is the bestselling autobiography of Ted Dexter - fondly known as Lord Ted - the ferociously powerful and debonair former England international cricketer who captained England in 1961-2, stood as England's chairman of selectors from 1989-1993 and then became President of the MCC in 2001. He is undeniably one of England's most prolific cricketers but, as he's eager to stress in the introduction of his book, he also lived a rich, lively and fulfilling life outside of his sporting career, with tales galore of his various escapades along the French Riviera, his experience of running a sports PR company, flying planes (just "because he could"), playing championship golf, racing greyhounds and so much more. A riveting read not only for those who recall his sporting legacy, but for anyone who resonates with Ted's fervent enthusiasm for both cricket and life. All book royalties will be donated to the MCC Foundation - Transforming Lives Through Cricket. Nominated for The Cricket Society and MCC 'Cricket Book of the Year' award.

When Cricket and Politics Collided describes one of the most extraordinary periods in the history of English cricket. A meeting on 27 August 1968 to select the players for a MCC winter tour of South Africa started a chain of events which would shake the very foundations of the cricket establishment. Over the next two years tours were cancelled, another abandoned and finally one of the founding Test playing nations banned from international cricket for over twenty years. Remarkably during this upheaval, and at very short notice, two replacement Test series were played. The first between between Pakistan and England, took place in a country where law and order were disintigrating and as a result the tour schedule was changing on an almost daily basis. The players were under enormous stress, their safety genuinely at risk, and even the country's President would soon be deposed. The second, pitted England against the Rest of the World, opponents that many considered to be the strongest ever assembled for an international match. These two series produced some of the most exciting cricket of the period, and yet both are now largely forgotten.

Samir Chopra is an immigrant, a "voluntary exile," who discovers he can tell the story of his life through cricket, a game that has long been an influence-really, an obsession-for him. In so doing, he reveals how his changing views on the sport mirror his journey of self-discovery. In The Evolution of a Cricket Fan, Chopra is thus able to reflect on his changing perceptions of self, and of the nations and cultures that have shaped his identity, politics, displacement, and fandom. Chopra's passion for the sport began as a child, when he rooted for Pakistan and against his native India. When he migrated, he became a fan of the Indian team that gave him a sense of home among the various cultures he encountered in North America and Australia. This "shapeshifting" exposes the rift between the Old and the New world, which Chopra acknowledges is "cricket's greatest modern crisis." But it also illuminates the identity dilemmas of post-colonial immigrants in the Indian diaspora. Chopra's thoughts about the sport and its global influence are not those of a player. He provides access to the inner world of the global cricket fan navigating the world that colonial empire wrought and that cricket continues to connect and animate. He observes that the Indian cricket team carries many burdens-not only must they win cricket matches, but their style of play must generate a pride that assuages generations of wounds inflicted by history. And Chopra must navigate where he stands in that history. The Evolution of a Cricket Fan shows Chopra's own wins and losses as his life takes new directions and his fandom changes allegiances.