As new free TV channel Spike shows Breaking Bad from the beginning, Jon Hotten looks at why the tale of Walter White's transformation from mild chemistry teacher to terrifying crime lord is 'the great modern study of male mid-life resentment'... About ten minutes into the first episode of Breaking Bad, Walter White ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Jon Hotten
The name of Sylvester Clarke is receding now, but during the first half of the 1980s in his years at Surrey it hung over county cricket in the same way that Sonny Liston's had hung over boxing: star-crossed, whispered, feared... Steve Waugh could feel the will of his Somerset team-mates "disintegrating" ... Read More...
Jon Hotten – aka the Old Batsman – is known for his cricket writing. But he’s also the author of Muscle, a hugely entertaining insight into the alarming world of professional bodybuilding. Here he explains how his involvement with the muscle business began… Bodybuilding is a world that seems very distant ... Read More...
Is there anything in sport more melancholy than the English cricketer when the long winter begins? Jon Hotten - The Old Batsman himself - looks back on his efforts in the summer of 2014... After one of my worst seasons ever with the bat last year, I began 2014 by scoring ... Read More...
'His party trick was to jump backwards onto a mantelpiece from a standing position'. Jon Hotten salutes the incomparable sporting Renaissance man, CB Fry... John Arlott called him 'the most variously gifted Englishman of any age,' and Arlott, conjuring his musty magic from an old typewriter set next a glass of ... Read More...
With his lazy, effortless elegance, few would dispute that David Gower was the most stylish batsman English cricket has produced. But does he count as a great?... In a recent post on my blog The Old Batsman, I argued that the last indisputably great batsmen that England had managed to produce ... Read More...
Jon Hotten on memory, dreams and cricket pitches... It's hard to write about a feeling as elusive as this one, yet it's that elusiveness that makes it both rare and worthwhile. It happened the other day, for the first time in a couple of years. I was driving through a town ... Read More...
The England Cricket Board recently terminated the career of its star player. The relationship was doomed from the start, says Jon Hotten... Last year a writer I liked very much died. Jonathan Rendall published three books, one of which, Twelve Grand, is among my favourites by any author. He was a ... Read More...
Amongst the most shocking moments of England's shocking Ashes series this winter was the sudden mid-tour retirement of Graeme Swann, one of the country's greatest ever spin bowlers. Here, Jon Hotten examines the mysteries of the spinner's art, and what Swanny leaves behind... Decades ago on a Saturday afternoon in winter ... Read More...
Our cricket correspondent Jon Hotten reveals why magazines - and readers - are obsessed with lists... Back in the mad, bad old days when I worked on magazines for a company that seemed invincible but no longer exists, I had a theory, probably rubbish, that most mags had a maximum of ... Read More...
