Saturday 21 October 2023 | 5.30pm
The Crown Hotel, Harrogate
Tickets: £13.00
Please note that all bookings are subject to a £1.75 transaction fee.


‘If you carry on like this, you’ll do nothing but play football and cricket all your life.’ These were the exasperated words of Mike Brearley‘s mother, and an unwitting but half-accurate prediction, for Brearley would become one of the most successful sportsmen of his generation.

But for Brearley, cricket wasn’t just a physical activity, it was also an intellectual game, offering the chance to bring closer together body and mind. When his cricketing career came to end he eschewed sporting commentary for a career as a psychoanalyst. Join us as Mike reviews his life with its attendant emotions, tensions and moves, his second thoughts and reassessments, allowing him to understand more fully things that were obscure to him earlier.

With wide-ranging meditations on sport, philosophy, literature, religion, leadership, psychoanalysis, music and more, Brearley delves into his private passions and candidly examines the various shifts, conflicts and triumphs of his extraordinary life and career, both on and off the field.

‘Absolutely riveting’ Amol Rajan, BBC Radio 4 Today