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Books

A portrait of a gay boxer

A Man’s World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith, by Donald McRae, tells the fascinating tale of a boxer who loved men, and killed a man

3 October 2015

9:00 AM

3 October 2015

9:00 AM

A Man’s World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith Donald McRae

Simon & Schuster, pp.440, £20, ISBN: 9781471132346

I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor of California, Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown, who in 1963 called for ‘the abolition of this barbaric spectacle’ because another man had just been beaten to death in the ring. That man was Davey Moore, who had defended boxing before it killed him on the grounds that no one stopped the Indianapolis 500 when racing drivers get killed.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £17 Tel: 08430 600033. Rose George’s books include Ninety Per Cent of Everything, about shipping, and The Big Necessity, about human waste.

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