When England won back the Ashes from Australia four summers ago there were open-top bus parades, gongs from Buckingham Palace and — in the case of the star all-rounder Andrew Flintoff — the most spectacular hangover yet broadcast on British television. Less well remembered is that there was also an extraordinary reaction in the book world as publishers pumped out commemorative titles to cash in on cricket’s rediscovered popularity.

This time, as the two nations prepare to lock horns again in the latest instalment of this most intense and historic of sporting rivalries, publishers are determined not to get left behind. They are, to borrow an expression from football, getting their retaliation in first.

The cricketer’s autobiography is a literary genre that goes back to W. G. Grace and two of the principal protagonists in that epic 2005 series have produced theirs in time for renewal of hostilities. Hoggy: Welcome to my World (HarperSport, £18.99; Buy this book; 344pp) is the engaging memoir of Matthew Hoggard, a key component in the England bowling attack. Hoggard has tried, with some success, to circumvent the banalities traditionally associated with such books and given some frank insights into his life and career. There have been countless retellings of the events of four years ago but this will surely be the only one intercut with anguished accounts of a couple’s inability to conceive the child they craved. Happily the Hoggards now have a son, ample compensation for the fact that the author’s international career was cut short with a ruthlessness that demonstrates the harsh reality of top-level sport.

Cricketing autobiographies do not come much heavier than Adam Gilchrist’s True Colours: My Life (Macmillan, £18.99; Buy this book; 627pp). The outstanding Australia wicketkeeper-batsman has wisely waited until after his retirement to review his stellar career (many cricketers view the autobiography like the CD greatest hits package, something to be revisited every decade), but the result is a book that weighs in like the memoirs of leading politician.

With his quintessentially Australian features, Gilchrist looked as if he could have played in any Ashes era, but his image as the typically brash Antipodean sportsman is revealed as sometimes only skin deep. Here is a man prone to tears and moved to write a note to himself after a succession of failures beginning: “I hate this game.”

Nevertheless, Gilchrist’s standing is confirmed by his being ranked No 10 in The Top 100 Cricketers of All Time (Corinthian, £14.99; Buy this book; 303pp) by Christopher Martin-Jenkins. Such lists can be done in two ways; as cynical exercises in box ticking or lovingly prepared, carefully considered and beautifully written eulogies to the greats of past and present. It will come as no surprise that the former Times Chief Cricket Correspondent and much-loved Test Match Special commentator has produced a book that falls into the latter category.

An appreciation of the past is more generally found among cricket devotees than those of any other sport, a fact understood perfectly by Simon Hughes in And God Created Cricket (Doubleday, £20; Buy this book; 312pp). Hughes takes us on a breathless tour through cricket history, the great players, personalities, matches and events. He never slackens pace or dwells on the dry details of the scorecard; the next entertaining anecdote is always waiting in the next paragraph.

It was the most tempestuous Ashes encounter of them all — the infamous Bodyline series of 1932-33 — that guaranteed the England fast bowler Harold Larwood a place among the game’s greats. Larwood’s life before, and more especially after, those extraordinary few weeks in an Australian summer more than 75 years ago is examined in Duncan Hamilton’s Harold Larwood: The Authorised Biography of the World’s Fastest Bowler (Quercus, £20; Buy this book; 387pp). This is a brilliant book, encompassing themes way beyond the narrow confines of sport. There is the grinding poverty of his upbringing in the vanished coalfields of Nottinghamshire, class war in the way he was cut adrift by the game’s ruling nobility and the quiet dignity and loyalty of Larwood himself, the man at the eye of the storm.

From the first ball being bowled in Cardiff on Wednesday until the end of the series at the Oval seven weeks later, there will undoubtedly be additions to the vast lore of the Ashes. More for Patrick Kidd and Peter McGuinness to consider should they decide to update The Best of Enemies: Whingeing Poms versus Arrogant Aussies (Know the Score Books, £9.99; Buy this book; 224 pp), as good a primer as you will find for anyone wondering what all the fuss is about.

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