A little over a century ago, the extinction of duelling would have struck Europeans and Americans as inconceivable. Despite the fact that arguments over its rights and wrongs had gone on for nearly a thousand years, duelling was firmly embedded in the European concept of justice. And as Robert Baldick makes clear in The Duel, the centuries-long hold that duelling had over Western civilization was full of drama, deceit, tales of honor and valor, and the complexities of legal justice.