SOURCE: Engel, Matthew. “A Dandy at the Crease.” New Statesman and Society 4, no. 147 (19 April 1991): 36.

In the following review, Engel criticizes Playing the Game, noting that Buruma is “far more of a journalist than he is a writer of imaginative fiction.”

Consider this: a Rajput princeling, deprived of his rightful inheritance by palace intrigues, emerges into fin-de-siècle English society as the most graceful and exciting cricketer of his time. The stuff of fiction, perhaps? Except that the story is true, or trueish. Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji of Cambridge University, Sussex and England (later His Highness Shri Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji, Jam Sahib of Nawanagar) really existed (1872-1933), unless, as Sir Neville Cardus surmised, “he was perhaps a dream, all dreamed on some midsummer's night long ago.”

Ranji was a late Victorian exotic, as English as Graeme Hick but far more fascinating. By every account (although there is, alas, no videotape...