Alan Clark was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. He served in the Household Cavalry before qualifying for the Bar in 1955. In 1974 he became Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton and went on to hold a number of ministerial posts. He wrote several works of military history: The Fall of Crete, Barbarossa: The Russo-German Conflict 1941-45 and Aces High: The War in the Air over the Western Front. He also published his Diaries. Alan Clark died in 1999.
A reprint of a book that helped set the tone for the sceptical 60s: an attack on the British high command in France in 1915, which in the author's view destroyed by incompetence what was left of the British Expeditionary Force of August 1914 (half of whom, as he might have mentioned, had become casualties before that Christmas). An immoderate statement of a moderately strong case by the Conservative Member of Parliament whose later Diarieswere a bestseller. (Kirkus UK)