‘Did you hear about the old man who turned 100?’ asked Sir Donald Bradman in a cheerful note to the journalist Johan Rivett in October 1968. ‘They asked him what it felt like. He said wonderful – I haven’t an enemy in the world. The buggers are all dead.’ That’s our Don: twenty years retired and still thinking in hundreds, eh? This century, it turned out, was one he could not overhaul: he was ninety-two when he died on 25 February 2001. But the job was done; the buggers were all dead. Bradman remains, to use Christine Wallace’s words from her new book The Private Don, ‘the best-ever player in the best-loved sport in the most sports-loving nation in the world’. Wallace’s book attests another quality: he remains a sporting media property without compeer.