Basil D'Oliveira

Six of his ten planets are cardinal, with two fixed and two mutable. Earth and water take three each, with two apiece in fire and air. Mercury sits thirty eight arcminutes from the end of Virgo. This chart holds a grand cross, made of Venus, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto. The record says D'Oliveira was classified as coloured in South Africa and unable to play first-class cricket there, that he came to England, and that his selection for a tour in 1968 got it cancelled and began South Africa's sporting isolation.

A grand cross is the most pressed figure a chart can make, four planets at right angles the whole way round with no side that can be let go of. It is also worth saying what this one is built out of: Venus and three slow planets. Saturn, Uranus and Pluto move slowly enough that their mutual angles belong to everybody born across a stretch of years, so three quarters of the rarest figure in this chart is shared with a whole cohort, and only the Venus corner is his. In a cricketer whose record turns on a single selection, a figure three quarters shared with a cohort is a thin thing to build an explanation on.

Inside that figure Saturn sits square Uranus at nine tenths of a degree, and the standing reading is order against revolt: the fight between security and freedom, and frustration with rules that serve nobody. A reader with that record in front of them will take it straight to 1968, and it does not go there. The reading describes a temperament, it was written for every chart carrying the angle, and what actually happened was that a cricket board picked a player and a government objected. A classification imposed on a man by a state is not in his chart, and neither is what other people did about it.

Venus holds two sides of the cross, square Saturn at under half a degree, warmth meeting a wall, and opposite Uranus at the same orb, closeness and freedom colliding. Venus also sits sixty degrees from Jupiter at under nine tenths, ease and goodwill, so the one personal planet in the figure reads three ways at once. His Moon sits on the sixth degree of Cancer at noon with Gemini still possible, so it is left out. Uranus was the only retrograde planet. He died at Worcester on 19 November 2011, at eighty. Nothing came inside three tenths of a degree of a natal planet that day, and the Moon was at its last quarter and forty per cent lit.