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Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart. By Alex Danchev. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998. ISBN 0-297-81621-7. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 369. L25.00.
The cover of Alex Danchev's book offers a warm likeness of the theorist's head and torso set by the German artist, Hein Heckroth, in a Daliesque landscape. That selection says a good deal about the book it encloses. Alchemist of War is an interesting book. It is a self-consciously literary book. It is not the biography of B. H. Liddell Hart that its subject would have foreseen. Neither is it a biography all of his friends and students will find themselves wholly comfortable with. Previous studies, Liddell Hart's own incomplete autobiography, Brian Bond's Liddell Hart: A Study of His Military Thought (Cassell, 197S77), supplemented by his British Military Policy between the Two World Wars (Oxford, 1980), and John Mearsheimer's revisionist Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (Ithaca, 1988), have confined their views and valuations of Liddell Hart to his success as a theorist of war and man of affairs. Alex Danchev, of England's Keele University, seeks to escape this narrowness. "To explain this phenomenon," Danchev writes, "it is necessary to liberate him, intellectually and contextually, from the military ghetto."