I HAVE NEVER had a Zidane moment. That is, I have never quite reached the point where the lid of human tolerance blows off the boiling cauldron of resentment, and the only option left for a red-blooded male is to drive a straight left into the nose of the pig-eyed idiot who has just insulted your wife, your principles or your driving skills, and settle the argument once and for all. I sometimes wish I had. There is something ultimately — if briefly — gratifying about the swift resolution of a finely judged upper-cut, or indeed a Zidane-style head-butt, known locally as a “Glasgow kiss”. Perhaps not, however, in front of 69,000 spectators.

Zinédine Zidane’s “moment of madness” is said to have come after the Italian Marco Materazzi handed out a double insult — impugning the morals of his mother and the terrorist links of his country of origin. For a man from the back streets of Marseilles, in the crucible of a World Cup final, that must have constituted cruel and unusual pressure. The old adage that sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you, is palpably untrue. Words that are intended to reach the deepest and most vulnerable part of the psyche leave wounds that linger long after the bruises have healed. The best response, of course, is a finely worded rejoinder or even a stream of your own invective, but sometimes the bon mot falls short in its effect.

It is almost a cliché to say that resorting to violence is an admission of defeat, but that is not always the way it seems at the time. I look back with something close to remorse at my failure, at university, to jump in and protect a friend who was being goaded into a fight by a group of off-duty soldiers in a Cambridge pub. He hit back, and came off worse. I slunk away. In that case, I am fairly certain, action rather than words would have been the better course.

We have a muddled attitude towards revenge. We condemn, in righteous indignation, Zidane’s folly, yet break into spontaneous cheers when the clean-cut movie hero flattens the sleazy villain in time-honoured cinema tradition. Towards the end of David Cronenberg’s film The End of Violence, the audience applauded spontaneously when the main character, goaded beyond endurance, finally took action against his attackers. John Wayne, Clint Eastwood or Bruce Willis hand out justice at the end of a gun and are counted heroes. In The Quiet Man, the climax of the movie comes when Wayne is finally driven to abandoning his pacifism and taking on his opponent in the way that we all want him to. Even a cartoon movie such as The Incredibles wins the support of its young audiences by celebrating aggression rather than inaction as the best way of dealing with injustice.

Revenge is one of literature’s great themes, whether it is agonised over, as in Hamlet, misguided in Othello, blood-stained in Titus Andronicus or gothic in The Duchess of Malfi. Othello speaks of “a capable and wide revenge” as the only way to “swallow up” his seething anger. In Julius Caesar, revenge comes “hot from hell”, cries “ Havoc! And lets slip the dogs of war”. Hot-headed or slow to deliver, it brings, for all of us, an apotheosis. It can be the stuff of comedy as well as tragedy. Lucky Jim wins our approval when he finally becomes a man of action with a sharp left hook, and Flashman, that great coward-hero, wins on points every time he floors another villain, whether by accident or on purpose, sending them cart-wheeling down a great flight of stairs or running them through with a mis-placed sabre.

Even in real life (or as real as the media allow it) we read, with tacit approval, stories of revenge, like the spurned wife who douses her husband’s Mercedes with red paint, and cuts out the crotches of his Savile Row trousers, or the abandoned lover who posts details of her boyfriend’s love-life on the internet. Far from being condemned for antisocial behaviour, they are accorded star status, and become, for a day at least, objects of media admiration.

Being a civilised people, of course, we tend to celebrate phrases rather than fists as the most effective weapon of retaliation. We fill books with the verbal dexterity of a Johnson, a Swift or a Winston Churchill. Churchill comes out with put-downs like “buggers can’t be choosers” on meeting Tom Driberg’s wife, or “Madam, you’re ugly, but tomorrow I shall be sober” on being accused by Bessie Braddock of being drunk — and we all guffaw.

Dr Johnson is applauded for his wit when he says “Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods”; he ridicules the harmless Lady Corke because she tells him that she admires the works of Laurence Sterne. “Why,” he quips, “that is because, dearest, you are a dunce.” Swift dismisses a society lady’s dress sense with: “She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.” We call them funny, but in fact they are as crude as a knee to the groin and may have been, at the time, every bit as painful.

This was the kind of insult, but shorn of humour, that came Zidane’s way in extra time, with France facing the final test, just after he had produced a header that, had it not been well saved, could have won France the World Cup. Of course, he should not have reacted as he did. Certainly, he should have turned his back. Better still, he might have come out with a Wildean quip. Instead he lost his head, lashed out and thumped the vituperative Italian in the chest.

Just for a moment, however — and the moment may have lasted less than an eyeblink — Zidane must have felt an overwhelming sense of satisfaction.

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone