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.