Having an pe can end in tears

By the Sword by Richard Cohen
519pp, Macmillan, £20

The clash of swords is the beginning of a conversation. Bullets merely speed by each other and either hit or miss their target, but blades engage. They smack and slither, disengage and reacquaint themselves. In fencing, a sequence of thrusts, parries and counterthrusts is termed a "phrase", and it is a phrase with practical meaning. Judges at a competitive fencing bout are licensed hermeneuts, their job to parse the grammar of flashing steel and to decide which hit lawfully landed first.

It is this essentially social and semantically pregnant nature of swordplay that explains why it still holds a fascination in our age of killing at a distance. Despite the best efforts of film directors from Sam Peckinpah to John Woo to make of gunfighting a kind of elaborate dance, the sword is still king. In the remote past of the Star Wars universe, for example, everyone has laser blasters, but the Jedi Knights and their foes contend with the noble light sabre. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon put the sword (as wielded in Tai Chi and other Chinese styles) back at the centre of the martial-arts film. Meanwhile, the Wachowski brothers, who choreographed the ballistic confetti of bullets and debris so beautifully in The Matrix , have decided to use swords along with firearms in that film's sequels, for which they have doubtless found a satisfying narrative excuse.

Richard Cohen, once editor of the novels of Jeffrey Archer, is eminently qualified to write a history of the blade, having been British sabre champion five times and fought in four Olympiads. His book is a rich compendium of colourful anecdotes from two millennia of swordplay, from gladiatoral battles in the Roman circus to modern competitive fencing.

Perhaps because there are slightly better chances of surviving a swordfight than a gunfight, there is ample room for comedy in the lore that Cohen has collected. In 17th-century Naples, we are told, a nobleman fought 20 duels to prove Dante a greater poet than Ariosto. "At last," Cohen writes, "he admitted that he had read the works of neither." And the great historian of fencing, Sir Richard Burton, recorded the following miniature, stark with fairytale symbolism and black humour: "A terrible story was told of a duel between a handsome man and an ugly man. Beauty had a lovely nose, and Beast so managed that presently it was found on the ground. Beauty made a rush for it, but Beast stamped it out of shape."

The western practice of duelling with swords, Cohen argues, had its roots in the judicial duel, sanctioned by Gundebald, King of Burgundy, in AD501. A man accused of a crime could nominate a champion to fight for him: if his champion won, he would be declared innocent. Might was right. Remarkably, the right to be tried by judicial duel remained on the statute books in Britain until 1817, when a man successfully used it to avoid charges of murder, because his accuser was too young to fight and could not afford a champion; thereafter, the law was hurriedly abolished.

Cohen examines the medieval tournament, in which the modern use of the tip (rather than the edge) of the blade, in foil and epée fencing, has its roots. "In fights to the death," he explains, "since swords could not cut through plate metal, knights would look for weak points in their opponent's armour - pushing their sword through a man's visor or at his armpit, thus encouraging a style of fighting that used the point."

It was during the great codification efforts of the Renaissance that swordplay began to be analysed extensively. Camillo Agrippa's 1553 Treatise on the Science of Arms with a Philosophical Dialogue features engravings suspected to have been executed by Agrippa's fencing buddy, Michelangelo.

Henry VIII set up a royal academy of fencing, and fencing masters published complex manuals of technique, many hinting vaguely at the master's knowledge of a " botte secrète ", or secret thrust - a special attack which could not be parried. These were snapped up in huge numbers by the growing number of men addicted to duelling - by now, the duel of honour had replaced the knightly duel of chivalry, which in turn grew out of the duel of law. The gentrification of fencing proceeded apace until the establishment in 1848 of the London Fencing Club, where to counterattack was considered very bad form.

The second half of the book covers a range of subjects including the culture of the swordsmith; the variously gruesome ways to die from a sword thrust; France in the age of the musketeers; and 20th-century Olympian contests. Although he narrates a couple of tense scenes from his own fencing career, the main weakness in Cohen's writing is in his presentation of actual fights.

Having once been a sabreur myself, I can visualise what Cohen means when he says, for example, that "the great Eduardo Mangiarotti liked to make a false attack to the inside of his opponent's arm, parry by quarte counterquarte, then flèche-riposte underneath his opponent's wrist" - but I doubt that paints a very vivid picture to any non-fencer, especially since his explanations of technical terms are scattered rather randomly throughout the book.

The virtues of By the Sword are, one might say, more anthological than analytical. In his chapter on Japan in the age of the samurai, for example, Cohen's reading of Japanese culture is contentious, to say the least. In order to talk up bushido (the way of the warrior), he writes: "Shintoism, which was never more than a cult, is not a religion or system of thought but an expression of national character" - which must be news to the millions of Japanese who worship at Shinto shrines to this day.

Nevertheless, it is from this subject that my favourite nugget in Cohen's pages arises. It is the fact that there exists a Japanese word, tsujigiri , which means "to try out a new sword on a chance passer-by". Since Japanese samurai swords, as Cohen explains, were usually tested by slicing the corpse of a criminal in twain from hip to opposite shoulder in one stroke, any unfortunate passer-by would probably not survive the execution of this lovely verb.

· Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy, a history of video games.

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