Sports writing at its best not only distills the essence of a particular sport but also says something about the wider culture within which it exists. Many sports (most notably cricket and boxing) are blessed with dozens of classics that achieve this feat - Norman Mailer's The Fight and Cyril James' Beyond a Boundary among them. Elsewhere the lives and times of legendary or contemporary sports men and women provoke fascination and awe; at their best biographies of such giants - from Tiger Woods to Andre Agassi to Diego Maradona - capture some of their spirit and personality on the page and allow us mere mortals a glimpse of a rarefied world.