Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart

by Alex Danchev

. 1999 clean bright copy

Genres: Military Fiction, Biography

1000 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Alex Danchev was Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham, and a long-standing friend of the Tate in London, where he has been a member of the Acquisition Committee of the Patrons of New Art.

His interests wandered across the borders of art, politics, and military history although his focus is chiefly biographical.

His biography of the philosopher-statesman Oliver Franks (Oxford University Press, 1993) was on the Observer's 'Books of the Year' and his biography of the military writer Basil Liddell Hart (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998) was listed for the Whitbread Prize for Biography and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.

His unexpurgated edition of the Alanbrooke Diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001) was listed for the W.H. Smith Prize for Biography. In 2009 he published On Art and War and Terror, a collection of essays on the most difficult issues of our age and, in particular, the nature of humanity in times of conflict.

Reviews

[Matthew Eyre · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a little disappointed by this. Liddle Hart has long been one of my favourite authors. His own horrific experiences in the trenches at The Somme made him look for alternatives to the face-to-face full on frontal assault; and so he may be credited with saving millions of lives in the wars since 1914-18. Perhaps he claimed too much credit, the book suggests. I did not find it an easy read, it did not have that smoothness the normal "He was born at an early age" approach yields.

[Jeff Wills · Rating 4 out of 5]

A excellent biography. Danchev is a superb writer and storyteller.