IF WE WERE TO TAKE much of what passes for sporting history seriously, we might be confused as to why National Socialism failed to disintegrate following Joe Louis' decisive right to the jaw of Max Schmeling, the German boxer who carried the hopes of Adolf Hitler to their heavyweight championship bout in 1938. Wasn't that the punch that delivered the “knockout blow to Aryan supremacy”, the punch that sounded “the death knell of Nazism”?

The fact that Hitler stayed in power long enough to trigger the Second World War tells us much about the inadequacy of such sporting clichés. Jesse Owens was another who was supposed to have rocked Hitler, winning four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics. The reality behind the myth is that Hitler scored a propaganda coup in 1936. How? Because Nazi intellectuals responded to Owens' success with the assertion that, because black people have abnormally large “animal” heel bones, the Americans had cheated by selecting a black man.

The merit of Kasia Boddy's meticulously researched and deeply intelligent examination of boxing through the ages is that it refuses to take the pop historian's route of lazy simplification. The political and moral ambiguity of the fights that have played such a seminal role in shaping human consciousness are chronicled in all their rich and equivocal detail. Was Ingemar Johansson's victory over Floyd Patterson responsible for a re-emergence of white pride as we are often told? Boddy points out that for every racist who hailed the defeat of the black champion there was another who feared that it might undermine the caricature of the powerful black brute.

Boddy's principal objective is to examine boxing as it has figured in the arts, and she transports us back to Ancient Greece and the writings of Homer. Epeios is revealed to have been the original boxing braggart: “I am the greatest. It will certainly be done as I say - I will smash through the man's skin and shatter his bones.” And the incident of the crowd urging Odysseus to get into fisticuffs with Iros is exposed as “the first instance of spectators as villains in boxing history: unwilling to fight themselves, but vicariously enjoying the risks someone else will run, and gambling on the outcome”.

The chapter dealing with Muhammad Ali is particularly magical. Few would dispute that the legacy of the former champion has been appropriated by the conservative Establishment.

Now quivering under the affliction of Parkinson's disease, he is held up as an all-American hero and paragon of consensual politics. When President George W.Bush presented Ali with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, he described him as a “man of peace” and having “a beautiful soul”.

It is all a far cry from the political radical of the 1960s who proselytised for racial segregation and articulated his opposition to Vietnam, not on pacifist grounds, but as a direct attack on the racism of white America: “no Vietnamese ever called me a nigger”. But Boddy argues that Ali has connived in this historical revisionism for commercial reasons: “As the new century began, Ali and his managers consolidated the new ‘brand' in a series of new ventures.”

In 2004, Taschen Books published a limited-edition tribute to Ali. The volume exemplified excess in every respect. The first 1,000 copies contained a self-assembly plastic sculpture by the master of kitsch consumerism, Jeff Koons. She goes on to quote Mike Marquesee sympathetically: “the Ali now offering himself up is a mere caricature of the original, a postmodern pastiche stripped of all political meaning.”

Perhaps Boddy's most impressive achievement is to have provided a persuasive case for a new kind of historical writing. Resisting the temptation to offer overarching themes and grand narratives, she contends herself with an examination of the minutiae of human symbolism and provides a compelling, multifaceted vision of how the struggle for dominance in the ring has served as a metaphor for mankind's struggle beyond. The history, like the Devil, is in the detail.

Sure, Boddy overreaches on occasions, but that is hardly surprising over the course of 400 pages. Attempting to get some mileage out of Philip Roth's use of pugilistic symbolism, she manages to misinterpret the satirical and transgressive preoccupations of the America writer.

Her trenchant criticisms of Norman Mailer are more apposite; even those of us who have been seduced by the old bruiser's outrageous gifts for literary evocation will concede that he was always a sucker for the killer metaphor.

It will be interesting to see if Boddy's tome is embraced by the boxing community, for she is not an apologist for a sport that many believe should be outlawed in civilised society. Be that as it may, her volume is one of the most intelligent sporting books of recent times, even if it consciously, and pleasingly, resists going for the knockout blow.

Boxing: A Cultural History by Kasia Boddy
Reaktion, £25; 480pp
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