By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions » (Reprint)

Richard Cohen is the former publishing director of Hutchinson and Hodder & Stoughton and the founder of Richard Cohen Books. The acclaimed author of By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions, he has written for The New York Times and most leading London newspapers, and has appeared on BBC radio and television. He lives in New York City.

By the Sword is an epic history of sword fighting—a science, an art, and, for many, a religion that began at the dawn of civilization in ancient Egypt and has been an obsession for mankind ever since. With wit and insight, Richard Cohen gives us an engrossing history of the world via the sword.

The New Yorker

Throughout this history of "swordplay" -- from its first depiction, in an ancient Egyptian mural, down to modern tournaments where hits are logged by electronic sensors -- Cohen draws upon his own experience as a sabreur who represented England in the Olympics. (One impressive photograph shows him in midair, executing a "horizontal flèche.") He concentrates, naturally enough, on the Western fencing tradition, of which he is a product -- its manuals, masters, champions, famous duels, and lore. Cohen loves the punctilious dressage of fencing -- citing with approval the Victorian masters who honed their pupils' footwork by making them stand on tea trays -- and is particularly drawn to instances where this vanished world has given us a cultural legacy. Men button their coats left over right, he says, to accommodate the swords that are no longer by their sides, and we shake hands, apparently, to show that we are not about to draw our swords. His narrative style, too, with its outspoken opinions and talk of fair play, embodies the "heroic archaism" that so evidently delights him.