Boxing has inspired a ton of great writing, with Hemingway, Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates heading up the list, but few offerings of recent years compare to Kasia Boddy's meticulously researched, lovingly chronicled and profoundly intelligent Boxing: A Cultural History.

Boddy's stated intention is to reveal the chronology of pugilism as it has figured in the arts, but this is a book that triumphantly transcends its modest aspirations. It lays bare the soul of a sport, its protagonists, hangers-on, promoters and philosophy; captures the complexity and ambiguity of its iconography; chronicles the ambivalence of its fans; and details the audacity of the artists who have been drawn to its bleak, broad canvas.

The chapters on 20th-century boxing are a case in point. Boddy wastes little time harping on about the clichés that figure in so much of sports writing, but instead offers a lesson in a new type of historical writing: detailed, layered and subtle. She points out that the great black boxers were not one-dimensional racial heroes but deeply complex cultural figures who often fitted into the prevailing white stereotype of the big, black brute and were embraced by many southern racists, particularly when their success went hand in hand with the social deference demanded by white sensibilities.

Boddy is also spot-on when discussing the greatest boxer of them all: Muhammad Ali. With characteristic perceptiveness, Boddy chronicles how the historical figure - radical, dangerous and subversive - has been hijacked by a dangerous revisionism that portrays him as a Gandhi-esque caricature: consensual, non-threatening and bereft of the contradictions that symbolised the divisions in American consciousness. But she goes farther, hinting that Ali conspired in this revisionism for commercial reasons: “As the new century began Ali and his managers consolidated his brand in a series of new ventures ... he sold 80 per cent of the marketing rights to his name and image for $50million [now about £33.8 million].”

This is not a book to read for a bit of light-hearted relaxation, but a penetrating, sparky and powerfully intelligent work of artistic, sporting and cultural history. But when you get to its final page you will find that you have not merely been entertained but enlightened, too. A literary knockout.