Patrick Kidd

Patrick Kidd is an English journalist, author and blogger specialising in sport generally, and cricket and rowing in particular.

Education and career

Kidd attended Colchester Royal Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read classics.^[1][2] While at Cambridge, he was a member of the P. G. Wodehouse Society and the Horatian Society.^[3]

He is currently the diary editor, and was previously a sports writer, for The Times, where he has been working since 2001.^[4][5] He has also written for The Spectator,^[6] Wisden Cricketers' Almanack and The Wisden Cricketer. He is also a regular radio and television pundit.

The Times hosted his blog Line and Length, "A very English cricket blog". He also wrote a light-hearted personal blog, The Questing Vole, about politics, history, culture and sport, in which he described himself as "a 1920s eccentric trapped in the body of a 21st-century journalist. Not a very fetching body, either."^[7] The blog takes its name from the opening of Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's satire on journalism.

Kidd's first book, Best of Enemies: Whingeing Poms Versus Arrogant Aussies, was released in early 2009. A second book, The Worst of Rugby, was published later that year. He edited an anthology of the first 50 years of the Times Diary.^[4] A collection of his parliamentary sketch-writing, The Weak Are A Long Time In Politics, was published in 2019.^[4]

Personal life

He is one of three children - with siblings, Tom and Rosie. As a child, his family lived on Mersea Island, off the coast of Essex in a semi-detached villa.^[8]

Kidd now lives in Eltham, London with his wife and two children, and serves as a church warden at All Saints, Blackheath, a Church of England parish church in Blackheath in London.^[9][3]

Published books

• The Best of Enemies: Whingeing Poms Versus Arrogant Aussies, Know the Score Books, 2009 (ISBN 1848187033)
• The Worst of Rugby: Violence and Foul Play in a Hooligans' Game Played by Gentlemen, Pitch Publishing Ltd., 2009 (ISBN 1905411421)
• The Times Diary at 50: The Antidote to the News, Times Books, 2016 (ISBN 978-0008205522)
• The Weak Are A Long Time In Politics, Biteback Publishing, 2019 (ISBN 9781785905339)