The picture in the prologue of a schoolboy in a fencing mask hurling himself horizontally, foil extended to touch the chest of a monk in a leather biker's jacket, says it all. Educated in fencing at Downside, five times National Sabre Champion, four times an Olympian, and a publisher of note, Richard Cohen could not be better fitted to write a book about the oldest and most romantic of all methods of individual combat.

But how to begin? And where to stop? After all, as Cohen tells, Bruce Lee wrote seven volumes on his own passion, the fencing-derived martial art of Jeet Kune Do. Sensibly, since all the best books make us fall a little in love with their authors, Cohen unapologetically follows his own inclination. He rapidly skates from Egypt to Waterloo in his first chapter, giving short shrift to medieval chivalry and majoring on techniques he respects and personalities who fascinate him – among them the transvestite Chevalier d'Eon, the real d'Artagnan and the "Admirable Crichton".

The halls of fame are thronged with men, and quite a few women, who trained as fencers: Ignatius Loyola and Descartes, Voltaire and Karl Marx, Prince Albert and Conan Doyle, Mussolini and Grace Kelly – and all five American presidents carved on Mount Rushmore. Swordplay has been high politics, directly in deciding early wars, indirectly via assassinations veiled as duels, and in recent times through the healthily displaced aggression of the Olympic Games.

Also part of the story is how swords were made, chivalry's 19th-century comeback through the influence of Thomas Malory's reprinted Morte D'Arthur on Sir Walter Scott and Tennyson, the swashbucking thrillers of Baroness Orczy and Rafael Sabatini, and cinema swordfights: from Douglas Fairbanks (who did all his own stunts) and Errol Flynn (who didn't) to The Seven Samurai and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

As simply thumping your opponent with the strongest sword was transformed into "the conversation of blades", swordsmanship emerges as a telling indication of national character. The English diversified early into boxing; the Italians brandished a five-foot rapier in one hand, a stiletto in the other; the French obsessively classified its terminology; the Hungarians excelled all (in Cohen's eyes) in skill and brio. Eastern ways were strikingly different from western. I found the short chapter on the samurai the most fascinating, a revelation of what can at best lie behind the skill and discipline of any single-handed combat: an exquisite involvement of brain, brawn, spirit and soul.

How often westerners fail to achieve that self-mastery nags at Cohen. Remove the sensational window-dressing of legendary characters, and at the heart of this book is a sobering story of how an honourable way of settling a quarrel became a sport as prone as any other to cheating. Reminiscences of his quintessentially honourable father, as well as admiration for his fencing-champion daughter's fine sense of fair play, load his objective, often amused descriptions of recent "Faustian pacts" and incidents of "honour betrayed". Cohen is a larger-than-life author, intensely in love with his theme, but too honest not to portray its tarnished prizes as well as its glittering ones.