Even before boxing had its Queensberry Rules, it had ‘the Fancy’. In the bare-knuckle days when matches could go on for hours and rounds were counted by the dozen, there were always well-heeled types in the front row of spectators, laying wagers and often setting up the matches themselves between ‘their’ champions. No surprise, then, that the two most famous foundational names in boxing belong to an earl and a marquess: Lonsdale and Queensberry himself.

We should not be surprised either that this most brutal of sports, which remained damaging and occasionally deadly even after the gloves went on, held literary attractions as well. True, some writers actually entered the ring, but for the most part they too were capitalising on others’ suffering. However much they relished the authenticity of boxing’s essential encounter, they were also indulging in nostalgie de la boue. And there have been a lot of them. The author Kasia Boddy, to whom John Sutherland’s book is dedicated, wrote a cultural history of boxing (2008) that drew on writers from Homer to Hollinghurst (via Hazlitt and Hemingway).

While there is certainly literary precedent for Professor Sutherland’s interest in boxing, 97 Fights itself is unexpectedly unliterary. He refers only briefly to Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, for example, when writing about the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ (Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman, 1974). He is much more likely to