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Inside Left is delighted to carry Mike Marqusee's recent appraisal of CLR James' Beyond a Boundary, a work of such scope, subtlety and insight that it is still regarded as the finest book ever written on cricket. This piece was originally penned for the magazine Red Pepper . A huge thank you to Mike for allowing his article to be reproduced here. A collection of his writing on politics, culture and sport can be found at www.mikemarqusee.com . When CLR James’ Beyond A Boundary was first published fifty years ago, the sociology of sport and the politics of popular culture had no place in the academy or on the left. The book had to create its own subject, define a new field of intervention. James aimed to establish cricket as worthy of serious study and to expose the failure to study it as an unacceptable omission. As he says at the start of the book, he could no longer credit an account of Victorian society that found no room for WG Grace. Like that other seminal work of 1963, EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class , James’ book aimed to rescue the culture created by the lower orders “from the condescension of posterity.”