More than any other sport, cricket has been immersed in politics, especially the politics of race, class and empire. Brilliant, complex, contradictory, beautifully observed, deeply insightful, but sometimes also romantic and naïve. He was a man whose affection for cricket was matched only by his love for Shakespeare. The book is in the image of the man himself.

He was an icon of black liberation struggles, and yet someone whose politics was steeped in a love of Western literature and Western civilization. He was a lifelong Marxist, yet one with an uncommonly fierce independence of mind that expressed itself both in his rejection of conventional Marxist arguments and in his refusal to repent of his politics even when it became fashionable to do so. Novelist and orator, philosopher and cricketer, historian and revolutionary, Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist – there are few modern figures who can match the intellectual depth, cultural breadth or sheer political contrariness of Cyril Lionel Robert James. John Arlott, that most wonderful of cricket commentators, wrote of Beyond a Boundary, that it was ‘a book so outstanding as to compel any reviewer to check his adjectives several times before he describes it and, since he is likely to be dealing in superlatives, to measure them carefully to avoid over-praise – which this book does not need’.īeyond a Boundary was a book that CLR James had to write, and that only he could write. V S Naipaul, not a man given to offering easy praise, described it as ‘one of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West Indies’. Beyond a Boundary blends politics and memoir, history and journalism, biography and reportage, in a manner that transcends literary, sporting and political boundaries. To call it a book about cricket is a bit like calling cricket a ‘game’. This year marks the 50 th anniversary of CLR James’ wonderful, groundbreaking work Beyond a Boundary.

Beyond the boundary james