SOURCE: Carr, J. L. “Extra Coverage without Being Caught Out.” Spectator 266, no. 8492 (13 April 1991): 33-4.

In the following review, Carr offers a positive assessment of Playing the Game.

Colonel Sir Shri Ranjitsinhji, Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, Prince of the (Mysterious) East, English folk-hero with diamond tie-pin in I. Zingari tie, a pocketful of Cartier gold eggs and, under his belt, 3000 runs, (av. 87) and a salute of five double-centuries in the Indian-summer of '99. Not Sir Walter Scott, not even Sir Bulwer Lytton opened a novel with more lustrous a hero. Why, even my father had heard of him.

And Mr Buruma's narrator [in Playing the Game], spotting that he is onto a winner, hurries off to develop this splendid theme.

He crosses an ocean, a sub-continent, a desert, to a bedroom in a decaying palace, notes its rack of fossilising cricket bats, the empty parrot cage, half-a-dozen glass eyes...