Sultan is the official biography of Wasim Akram, the "sultan of swing", one of the greatest fast bowlers in the history of cricket. For twenty years, Wasim Akram let his cricket do the talking - his electrifying left-arm pace, his explosive left-handed striking, his leadership and his inspiration. For another twenty years he kept his own counsel about those days, full of drama, controversy and even mystery, in a country, Pakistan, that to outsiders is a constant enigma. Until now. Sultan tells the story of cricket's greatest left-arm bowler, and one of its greatest survivors, who was chosen from the streets of Lahore and groomed by Imran Khan to become champion of the world - man of the match in the final of the 1992 World Cup. Along the way were unforgettable rivalries with the greatest of his time, from Viv Richards and Ian Botham to Sachin Tendulkar and Shane Warne. Along the way, too, a backdrop of conspiracy and intrigue over ball tampering and match fixing about which Wasim finally sets the story straight. But there's more: Sultan goes frankly into the crumbling and rebuilding of Wasim's private life, marred by the tragedy of his first wife's death and the torment of addiction. The result is an unprecedented insight into the life of a cricketer who revolutionised the game with his speed and swing, and a patriot buoyed and burdened by the expectation of one of the game's most fanatical publics.

'The year's best cricket book' Daily Telegraph 'Well researched and engagingly written, this exemplary work reveals a hidden history...superbly told story' Sunday Times 'Easily the cricket book of the year, of the century...It extends the possibility of cricket-writing-as-literature' Suresh Menon, The Hindu It is arguably the most famous photograph in the history of cricket. In George Beldam's picture, Victor Trumper is caught in mid stroke, the personification of cricketing grace, skill and power, about to hit the ball long and hard. Yet this image, 'Jumping Out', is important not only because of who it depicts, but also what it illustrates about the changing nature of the game and how it has been seen. Now, in Gideon Haigh's brilliant new book, Stroke of Genius, we learn not only about the man in the picture but also the iconography of Trumper's powerful position in cricket's mythology. For many, Australian batsman Trumper was the greatest ever. Neville Cardus wrote: 'I have never yet met a cricketer who, having seen and played with Victor Trumper, did not describe him without doubt or hesitation as the most accomplished of all batsmen of his acquaintance.' Like Lionel Messi or Roger Federer today, he defied the obvious bounds of affiliation. Unlike the current generation of sporting stars, however, there were no memoirs or papers, very few interviews, no action footage - even his date of birth is a matter of debate and conjecture. What isn't in doubt, though, is the impact he had on the game and on his nation. Haigh reveals how Trumper, and 'Jumping Out', helped to change cricket from the Victorian era of static imagery to something much more dynamic, modern and compelling. As such, Trumper helped not only transform cricket but even the way his country viewed itself.

'A superb portrait of the most brilliant cricketer of his generation' Mike Atherton Shane Warne dominated cricket on the field and off for almost thirty years - his skill, his fame, his personality, his misadventures. His death in March 2002 rocked Australians, even those who could not tell a leg-break from a leg-pull. But what was it like to watch Warne at his long peak, the man of a thousands international wickets, the incarnation of Aussie audacity and cheek? Gideon Haigh saw it all, still can't quite believe it, but wanted to find a way to explain it. In this classic appreciation of Australia's cricket's greatest figure, who doubled as the nation's best-known man, Haigh relieves the highs, the lows, the fun and the follies. The result is a new way of looking at Warne, at sport and at Australia. 'Bloody brilliant... As good as anything I have read on the game' Guardian Winner of The Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year

This July sees the publication of The Great Romantic, a new biography by Duncan Hamilton of the greatest cricket writer of all time, indeed the man who invented modern cricket writing as we know it: Neville Cardus. Cardus was for many years cricket correspondent of the (then Manchester) Guardian, but wrote for a host of other publications including Wisden. Before him, cricket writing meant rather drybones match reports full of statistics and jargon. Cardus wrote about the event: the sylvan ground, the emotion of watching a great batsman like Victor Trumper in full flow. For everyone who wants to sample his finest writings, Safe Haven now publishes a new volume of Cardus's best cricket writings. Here is Cardus on Don Bradman, Victor Trumper, Denis Compton and Richie Benaud, at Roses matches and the arcadian cricket festival at Dover beneath Shakespeare Cliff, seeing the Australians defeated at Eastbourne - and of course at the home of cricket, Lord's. A handsome small hardback with retro cover illustration, here is a book for every lover of fine writing on the Summer Game.

Chronicling the rise and fall of an extraordinary web of influence, this account documents the events that culminated in the landmark ruling that made abortion legal in Australia and caused a public inquiry that humiliated a powerful government and glamorous police force. With forensic skill and psychological subtlety, this is a story of corruption, suffering, murder, suicide, courtroom drama, and political machinations. Artfully combining cultural history, investigative journalism, and true crime, this analysis examines the full spectrum of people involved, from the women themselves to the lawmakers, police, campaigners, and abortionists--who included a multimillionaire philanthropist, a communist bush poet, a timid aesthete, and a bankrupt slaughterman. A fascinating and disturbing backstory to an issue that remains ever divisive, this compelling narrative is an important contribution to the ongoing abortion debate.

What is it like to follow the sun as a T20 gun for hire? Dan Christian is one of the world's most sought after cricketers, not only a star for the Sydney Sixers but having been part of teams in premier leagues from India and Pakistan to South Africa and the Caribbean. In The All-Rounder, he takes us on a globe-trotting tour from Karachi to Cardiff, from the billion-dollar Indian Premier League, where he played for Virat Kohli's Royal Challengers Bangalore, to the inaugural season of England's new franchise competition The Hundred, where he led Manchester Originals. It was a never-ending summer like no other, shadowed by COVID-19, encased in bio-secure bubbles, in which Dan also reflected on his indigenous heritage and grappled with imminent fatherhood, all the while concentrating on a fast-evolving, high-stakes game in which you're a champion one day, a chump the next.

Has COVID-19 ushered in the end of the office? Or is it the office's final triumph? For decades, futurologists have prophesied a boundaryless working world, freed from the cramped confines of the office. During the COVID-19 crisis, employees around the globe got a taste of it. Confined by lockdown to their homes, they met, mingled, collaborated, and created electronically. At length, they returned to something approaching normality. Or had they glimpsed the normal to come? In The Momentous, Uneventful Day, Gideon Haigh reflects on our ambivalent relationship to office work and office life, how we ended up with the offices we have, how they have reflected our best and worst instincts, and how these might be affected by a world in a time of contagion. Like the factory in the nineteenth century, the office was the characteristic building form of the twentieth, reshaping our cities, redirecting our lives. We all have a stake in how it will change in the twenty-first. Enlivened by copious citations from literature, film, memoir, and corporate history, and interspersed with relevant images, The Momentous, Uneventful Day is the ideal companion for a lively current debate about the role offices will play in the future.

'The best cricket writer in the world' Guardian 'The Bradman of cricket writing' Sunday Telegraph 'The finest cricket writer alive' The Australian 'Australia's finest writer on cricket' The Times 'The most gifted cricket essayist of his generation' Richard Williams, Guardian In On The Ashes, Gideon Haigh, today's pre-eminent cricket writer, has captured over a century and half of Anglo-Australian cricket, from WG Grace to Don Bradman, from Bodyline to Jim Laker's 19-wicket match, from Ian Botham's miracle at Headingley to the phenomena of Patrick Cummins and Ben Stokes, today's Ashes captains. From over three decades of covering The Ashes, Gideon has brought together an enduring vision of this timeless contest between Australia and England - the world's oldest sporting rivalry - from the colonial era to the present day.

Beyond The Pavilion spans seventy years of social, regional and cultural history through the eyes of one of cricket’s earliest Test match wayfarers, Barry Knight. As a ten-year-old, Barry saw Don Bradman’s 1948 ‘Invincibles’ at Lord’s. His early days were spent playing street cricket in London’s East End, captaining his school against Eton College, and later captaining England Schoolboys. At the age of fifteen, he was recruited to play for Essex and went on to become one of England’s finest all-round cricketers. In this memoir, Barry reflects on his international playing career and his experiences touring India, Pakistan, Australia and New Zealand in the 1960s. He recounts tours with Fred Trueman, Geoff Boycott, Ted Dexter, and Colin Cowdrey and playing against the era’s best Australian, Indian, Pakistani, and West Indian players. He also shares stories about life in London in the Swinging Sixties and his place in the D’Oliveira affair, and the anti-apartheid protests. After his retirement, Barry moved to Australia in the 1970s and became Australia’s first professional cricket coach mentoring and developing three Test match captains: Allan Border, Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh. He also had a front-row seat in the development of World Series Cricket. The book includes endorsements from leading players, commentators and journalists, including Sir Garfield Sobers, Allan Border, Ian Chappell, Barry Richards, Geoffrey Boycott, Doug Walters and Sir Michael Parkinson. This sporting memoir is richly illustrated with photographs from Andrew Leeming’s and other private collections.

For many of us, it's where we spend more time and expend greater effort than anywhere else. Yet how many of us have stopped to think about why? In The Office: A Hardworking History, Gideon Haigh traces from origins among merchants and monks to the gleaming glass towers of New York and the space age sweatshops of Silicon Valley, finding an extraordinary legacy of invention and ingenuity, shaped by the telephone, the typewriter, the elevator, the email, the copier, the cubicle, the personal computer, the personal digital assistant. Amid the formality, restraint and order of office life, too, he discovers a world teeming with dramas great and small, of boredom, betrayal, distraction, discrimination, leisure and lust, meeting along the way such archetypes as the Whitehall mandarin, the Wall Street banker, the Dickensian clerk, the Japanese salaryman, the French bureaucrat and the Soviet official. In doing so, Haigh taps a rich lode of art and cinema, fiction and folklore, visiting the workplaces imagined by Hawthorne and Heller, Kafka and Kurosawa, Balzac and Wilder, and visualised from Mary Tyler Moore to Mad Men, from Network to 9 to 5 plus, of course, The Office. Far from simply being a place we visit to earn a living, the office emerges as a way of seeing the entire world.

Meet Moof, Womble, Castaway, Churchyard and One Dad, a dog called Six Bits and a van known as the Bog Roll Express.Every summer weekend, the parks of Australia turn themselves over to countless thousands of club cricket matches. One of those clubs is the Yarras.This is the inside story of their most memorable season, told by the vice-president, chairman of selectors, newsletter editor, trivia-night quizmaster, karaoke impresario and club greyhound shareholder, Gideon Haigh.The Vincibles is about playing for love, winning with grace, losing with humour, valuing your community, and other anachronistic notions. It features 69 ducks and 257 dropped catches.(Not that we're counting.)The spirit of cricket isn't dead. It's just upped and moved to the suburbs.

From one of the finest writers on the game comes ""Inside Out"", Gideon Haigh's latest despatches from the crease.In 2008, he celebrates the centenary of Bradman's birth and 75 years of Bodyline; ponders the quintessence of the 'Don', even as he looks at cricket's other knights; dissects the Australian way of cricket across demography, politics and the politics of race; attempts to unravel the mystery that is cricket administration; and explains the finer points of cricket technique from taking guard to the leave.Whether it be the game as it is played on the world arena or at grass-roots level, Haigh will compel you to regard the game anew.

In the second Quarterly Essay of 2003, Gideon Haigh scrutinises the way we have turned CEOs into tin gods. Is moral outrage the appropriate response to the collapses of Enron or HIH or are we all implicated in a crazy system? Haigh argues that the attempt to create great entrepreneurs of the new caste of CEOs by giving them shares is doomed to failure and inherently absurd. In a tough-minded, vigorous demolition job on the culture that produced the cult of the CEO, Haigh writes a mini-history of business and shows how the classic traditions of capitalism are mocked by the managerialism of the present. 'The world where the CEO is deemed to be a 'genius' at least equal to a great actor or a great sportsman is a world in which ...Gideon Haigh refuses to believe.' - Peter Craven, Introduction 'The making of the modern CEO has been a story of more- more power, more discretion, more ownership, more money, more demands, more expectations and, above all, more illusions. More, as so often, has brought less ...' - Gideon Haigh, Bad Company

In May 1977, the cricket world awoke to discover that a thirty-nine-year-old Sydney Businessman called Kerry Packer had signed thirty-five elite international players for his own televised `World Series'. The Cricket War is the definitive account of the split that changed the game on the field and on the screen. In helmets, under lights, with white balls, and in coloured clothes, the outlaw armies of Ian Chappell, Tony Greig and Clive Lloyd fought a daily battle of survival. In boardrooms and courtrooms Packer and cricket's rulers fought a bitter war of nerves. A compelling account of the top-class sporting life, The Cricket War also gives a unique insight into the motives and methods of the man who became Australia's richest, and remained so, until the day he died. It was the end of cricket as we knew it - and the beginning of cricket as we know it. Gideon Haigh has published over thirty books, over twenty of them about cricket. This edition of The Cricket War, Gideon Haigh's first book about cricket originally published in 1993, has been updated with new photographs and a new introduction by the author.

Founded in 1888, James Hardie Industries is one of Australia's oldest, richest and proudest corporations. And its fortunes were based on what proved to be one of the worst industrial poisons of the twentieth century: asbestos. Asbestos House, the name of the grand headquarters that Hardie built itself in 1929, tells two remarkable tales. It relates the frantic financial engineering in 2001 during which Hardie cut adrift its liabilities to sufferers of asbestos-related disease, the public and political odium that followed, and the extraordinary deal that resulted. It is also the story of how the company, forgot how, even as fibro built a nation, the asbestos fibre from which it was made condemned thousands to death. Reconstructed from hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of pages of documentation, Asbestos House is a saga of high finance, industrial history, legal intrigue, medical breakthrough and human frailty.