Word: cardus
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...Frank Woolley of Kent, another of the game's immortals, Cardus writes: "His cricket is compounded of soft airs and fresh flavors. The bloom of the year is on it [and] the very brevity of summer is in it ... Woolley, so the statisticians tell us, often plays a long innings. But time's a cheat . . . The brevity in Woolley's batting is a thing of pulse and spirit, not to be checked by clocks, but only to be apprehended by imagination. He is always about to lose his wicket; his runs are thin-spun ... An innings...
Reviewing Cardus, the Guardian was moved to a flattering comparison: "Where would Homer's gods and heroes ... be without Homer...
...Cardus clerked for an insurance firm, learned cricket beside a rubbish dump and set himself a course of reading that would have floored an Oxford don. After listening to a light opera one evening, he discovered that his mind "retained music as the kidneys secrete water." (Now, after reading in bed at night, Cardus switches off the lamp, selects some favorite composition from his head and conducts an imaginary concert before falling asleep...
...spare time, young Cardus imitated the austere wit of the Guardian's reviews of the arts, hoping to write for it himself. In 1917, after four years of batting and bowling as assistant cricket coach at Shrewsbury School, Cardus got his wish. The Guardian's Editor C. P. Scott hired him as a reporter, and Cardus stayed on the paper for 22 years...
Inside Lights. Subbing for the first-string music critic, Cardus once heard a Russian tenor sing Nekrasov's The Wanderer. Wrote Cardus: "At the passage where we hear the piteous lamentation of the starving peasant, [his] face was as though a light had been turned down inside; at the cry 'Cold! Cold!' the cheeks . . . became sunken; the body contracted as though intensely chilled, the hands clenched, and, surely, the voice itself was pinched ... An eloquent animation, almost sculptural...