Other sports take as metaphors the real action of boxing. Football teams can come out swinging and tennis players may find themselves on the ropes, but no one describes a knockout in the ring as a ‘slam dunk’ or a ‘home run’. For seasoned sportswriter Donald McRae, bouts involve ‘such danger and damage, and even death, that it is wrong to compare boxing to sports where games are played’. The singular seriousness of boxing is one of the focal points of The Last Bell, which studies not just the fighters themselves but also the murky business that has sprung up around them.

McRae’s book mixes reportage, memoir and polemic. It can perhaps best be understood as a series of elegies: for his parents and sister, who died within the space of two years while he was working on the book; for the many boxers killed by the sport they love; for the fight game itself. It is also a coda to the author’s own career as a boxing writer – a chronicle of how he fell out of love with a sport he deems ‘as crooked and destructive as it is magnificent and transformative’.

Although it has evolved into a global behemoth, boxing is at heart a lonely and individual sport. McRae is attentive to aspects of it other writers might ignore. He lovingly describes the pre-fight dressing-room rituals – the wrapping and taping of the hands – and captures the sepulchral stillness that