Richard Cashman wears many hats. He’s a university professor, a historian, a biographer, co-founder of the Australian Society for Sports History … and a left-handed batsman. It’s this last hat, referenced in the title and celebrating his love of cricket, that he wears most happily and humbly.

This memoir bears a historian’s eye for detail, along with an uncanny knack of being close to important world events. ‘May you live in interesting times’ is a well-known Chinese curse, but for Cashman it’s been a blessing.

His education in History began at Sydney University with postgraduate study at Monash, becoming the first-ever graduate from that nascent institution. At that stage, Cashman’s academic interest was in Indian History; sport was a pastime. He studied for his PhD at Duke University, North Carolina, in 1963, arriving just before JFK was assassinated. He returned to Australia in 1972 – just in time for Gough Whitlam’s election win – and lectured at UNSW.

When his love of India, its cricket and historiography intersected, a writing career was born. It’s unthinkable now but connecting ‘sport’ with ‘history’ was anathema to the academy then. Biographies of famous sportspeople soon followed. A conversation in the back of a taxi was the catalyst for co-organising the first sports history conference in 1977. The memoir also features Cashman’s interest in politics, its internecine battles and cast of ‘colourful characters’, plus the political intrigue of university life.

The attention to chronology, rather than theme, can be frustrating: reader interest is stirred in one direction before the author veers towards another. Cashman is a gifted storyteller, however, and carries the reader with him through his ‘interesting times’.

Reviewed by Bob Moore