Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson brings a British journalist’s close attention to place across writing about cricket, music, literature, and the arts. That Will Be England Gone uses the 2019 county cricket season as the framework for a broader meditation on Englishness and cultural change. Henderson travels among grounds while reflecting on poetry, classical music, film, landscape, and traditions attached to the game. Constable published the book, whose title comes from Philip Larkin, in 2020; the paperback arrived the next year. It received recognition from the Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year awards. Although cricket supplies the route and rhythm, the book is neither a match chronicle nor a technical sporting manual. Its digressions ask what is preserved, imagined, or lost when institutions and local customs change. Henderson’s experience as cricket correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and as an arts writer informs that blend. That Will Be England Gone offers sports writing that opens naturally into memoir, criticism, and cultural history.