Twirlymen, by Amol Rajan

The resurgence of spin bowling in the past couple of decades has been a joy to behold, and in Amol Rajan the twirlers have found a historian worthy of their deceptive art.

He leads us from the early days of underarm through to the era of the doosra and the carrom ball, and one of the many strengths of this fascinating book is the graphics he uses to illustrate how the many variations, including the flipper, the arm ball and the top-spinner, are achieved.

His judgements are sound – he is surely correct to call Sydney Barnes the greatest bowler of them all, his 70mph spinners bringing him staggering figures in all cricket of 6,229 wickets at an average of 8.33 runs apiece – and when he queries accepted wisdoms he does so from a position of impeccable research.

For instance, he convincingly argues that the so-called inventor of the googly, Bernard Bosanquet, was no such thing, makes a good case that the Aussie off-spinner Jack Potter was bowling the doosra 30 years before Pakistan's Saqlain Mushtaq, and that W G Grace was one of the earliest exponents of the flipper.

This is a brilliant, revisionist book, and it would have been an even better one if Rajan's hyperbole didn't occasionally get the better of him: it's debatable whether spin is cricket's "most exceptionally beautiful art form", but just plain silly to dismiss all medium and fast bowling as having "all the romance of genital warts". And when, with an apparently straight face, he offers a delivery of his own devising, "Rajan's Mystery Ball", for the benefit of a grateful cricketing world, it is hard not to smile.

But these are minor blemishes in an otherwise exceptional work which should be compulsory reading for anyone who claims to love the game even half as much as the author evidently does.

Published in hardback by Yellow Jersey, £14.99