Boxing has always provoked passionate responses, attracting committed followers and outspoken critics in all sections of society. Objections to the spectacle of legal violence has been tempered by those who admire and are drawn to boxing as a supremely disciplined activity, who see it as a science or an art. But many still revile it as a decadent sport. It is these tensions, between sport and art, aesthetics and perversion, that have shaped boxing's...