As Max Bonnell details early on in his new book Brick by Brick, the Australian Cricketers in England 1964, the Ashes series of that summer gets a pretty bad rap. To an extent, that’s understandable given only one of the five Tests had a winner and one of the draws, the Old Trafford batathon, is seen as an emblem of where much of that decade was less than captivating. But off the field, it was transformative. Specifically that summer, with Beatlemania at its peak and the election of an ambitious Labour government just around the corner. And cricket was changing at a rapid pace too, even if it wasn’t immediately obvious at the time. Max does a fine job of threading these themes together and casting the cricket in a more flattering light than is usually so, when Bob Simpson’s men went to England and got the job done.

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