And there are no do-overs

And there are no do-overs. "Golf gives no margin," he writes. "You cannot hedge; you cannot bluff; you cannot give a stop-order; you cannot jilt. One chance is given you, and you hit or miss . and it is just this ultra and extreme rigidity that makes golf so intensely interesting."

Most of Haultain's best golfing insights are equally plain-spoken, but for a complete appreciation of his writing - very much a product of his time and intellectual station - you might want to have some extra "clubs" in your bag.

A good thesaurus, a couple of classical dictionaries, an anatomy textbook, an understanding of 19th century psychology and a solid grounding in the works of practically every big hitter on the Western tour, from Herodotus to Hegel, from Shakespeare to Schiller, from Juvenal to William James - all would help. But they're not all that necessary.

One solid investment, though, might a dictionary of Scottish English, where you could conceivably find some of the standard golfing terms of Haultain's day, most of them now sadly superseded by the bland nomenclature of the contemporary game. Clubs are brasseys (drivers), niblicks (irons) and creeks (oneirons); mis-hits are sclaffs and foozlers.

"Say what you the scoffers may," Haultain writes, "to foozle at golf ... cuts right down to the very deeps of the human soul."

Amen to that. A century later, virtually all of Haultain's amateurish (in the good sense) observations hold true - except for his complete whiff on the subject of professionalism. Golf, he declares, "will never be played by highly-paid professionals for the delectation of a howling and betting mob; nor, thank Heavens, will rooters ever sit on fences and screech at its results."