CHRIS HEWETT
THINKING ALLOWED

ACCORDING to Inkoo Kang, a leading critic at The New Yorker magazine and, almost by definition, a writer whose words are barely distinguishable from music, it was “like a box of bonbons gifted around the holidays: pleasing, elegant, forgotten as soon as it’s consumed…driven by intricate plotting rather than by meaningful character development”. An American journalist spending her festive time watching English club rugby on the gogglebox? Who’d have thought it?
Time for a reality check: she wasn’t. Watching rugb...