John Keegan

In and all around his desk piles of books jostle for space with as yet unanswered letters of congratulation. John Keegan was knighted in the Millennium honours and is still not quite used to the idea. We were sitting in Keegan’s office in the large manor house in rural Wiltshire that he and his wife Susanne (author of books on Alma Mahler and Kokoschka) acquired fifteen years ago. 

Maybe it was the West Country air. Or the fact that, shortly after the house move, Keegan quit his job lecturing at Sandhurst and joined the Daily Telegraph. Whatever the cause, the effects were a cascade of major works: The Mask of Command (a study of generalship), substantial military histories of both world wars, an elegant peregrination around the battlefields of North America, the colossally ambitious History of Warfare and the BBC’s 1998 Reith Lectures, War and Our World. All these (not to mention an anthology of ‘great military writing’) constitute an astonishing efflorescence of talent that, by Keegan’s own admission, remained many years in the bud.