About the Author

A historian and former playing member of MCC, Richard Tomlinson received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University before becoming an award-winning international journalist with the Independent, Fortuneand other publications in Europe, North America and Asia. In Amazing Grace: The Man who was W.G., Tomlinson combines his passion for cricket and historian's eye to connect Grace's astounding feats on the playing field with an imperial landscape populated by a Dickensian cast of characters who crossed his majestic path, from failed Australian gold rush speculators and an American Civil War hero to the syphilitic secretary of MCC.

Reviews

Richard Tomlinson's magnificent biography of sport's first global superstar
*Daily Telegraph*

Amazing Grace is a fluently written study, imbued with humour and sympathy, that yields many insights as well as much pleasure
*Daily Telegraph*

What makes [Tomlinson's] book so refreshing is that he is entirely clear-sighted about his subject's foibles . . . [he] effectively conveys the sheer competitive drive that made him so successful . . . offers some intriguing glimpses of the anxieties that made him stay so long and probably made him such a great player . . . [Grace] emerges from this book as Ian Botham, Kevin Pietersen, Paul Gascoigne and David Beckham rolled into one: a symbol not just of Victorian England, but of sport itself
*Sunday Times*

A compelling book that uncovers a man as complex and contrary as any in Victorian society
*Mail on Sunday*

It's a pleasure to read a biography as thoughtful and assiduous as Richard Tomlinson's . . . Tomlinson clearly likes [Grace] as well as revering him, and so did I after finishing this lovingly crafted piece of work
*Daily Mail*

Industrious, witty, insightful, this biography ought to be the standard work on W.G. for years to come
*Independent*

Scrupulously researched and well written
*New Statesman*

My biography of the year . . . a revelatory study of the giant who remains cricket's most iconic figure
*Evening Standard*

The cricketer W. G. Grace is instantly recognisable as an icon of the Victorian age, if only by virtue of his impossibly bushy beard, but as Richard Tomlinson emphasises in this terrifically readable biography, he was, in his time, at the cutting edge of modernity. Grace dominated the game to an extent matched later only by Australian Donald Bradman and was the word's first sporting superstar
*Mail on Sunday*