A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W.K. Hancock, by Jim Davidson; UNSW Press, 2010, 624 pages, $59.95. The name W.K. Hancock continues to have a wide resonance throughout the English-speaking scholarly world, particularly among historians. His reputation has eluded the “pigeon-holers”; he was neither particularly right or left, terms he thought foreign and even pernicious, but he did seem to live the life of both a traditionalist and a radical, descriptive terms he favoured, at various stages of his long and illustrious career. Clearly, he had a many-cornered life—taking in Britain (his second home), Italy, West Africa, South Africa (as reflected…