Almanack: Text-book stuff

AN INTERESTING publication arrives from the Institute of Criminology. Cricket and the Law is a fascinating monograph by David Fraser of the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney which should provide welcome ammunition for the summer's saloon bar debates. A few chapter headings give a taste: 'Mankad, Javed, Hilditch, Sarfraz and the Rule of Law' deals with specifics, 'You . . . - Sledging and Cricket as Ethical Discourse' with semantics, and 'Leg Before Wicket, Causation and the Meaning of Life' with philosophy.

Almanack's finest legal brains were impressed with the tome's erudition: they were particularly taken with Fraser's deconstruction of a description of village cricket by Lord Denning. 'The power of Denning's textualisation of cricket,' Fraser notes, 'exists because the text/practice of cricket he calls upon is threatened by a competing text. Without the Other, there can be no Self.' Howzat?