Of course, as Günter Grass (not quoted by Boddy) wrote in My Century: "Artists and intellectuals have always been fascinated by boxing. Brecht wasn't the only one with a weakness for a fast fist. Before Max Schmeling went to America and made headlines, all kinds of famous figures - Fritz Korner the actor, Josef von Sternberg the film director, even [the anti-Nazi writer] Heinrich Mann - flocked to see him and be seen with him."

Nevertheless, the best writers about boxing have mostly been journalists primarily: Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, even HL Mencken, and, in our time, David Remnick and Hugh McIlvanney.

"Cultural uses of boxing," Boddy considers, "fall into three categories: dialectical, iconographic, and naturalist." In the first, boxing is "a metaphor for opposition"; a fight "dramatizes an interaction between points of view, or ideas". This is so obvious as to be scarcely worth saying. "Those who use boxing iconographically are more interested in considering the symbolism of boxing's personnel and paraphernalia ... Finally boxing lends itself to the naturalist desire to imagine formlessness, decline, damage and mortality. The naturalist boxer is not an icon, but a piece of matter ... etc." He might of course be both - and -often is.