Name a selection of your own most interesting and iconic Australians of the last century. My personal list would begin with John Monash, Donald Bradman, and W.K. Hancock.

‘W.K. who?’ We have always favoured the military and the sporting over the intellect in our national pantheon. Even this splendid study of Professor Sir William Keith Hancock – A Three-Cornered Life – has the unusual subtitle: The Historian W.K. Hancock. It is hard to imagine a biography of ‘The Don’ informing us that it is of ‘The Cricketer Donald Bradman’.