Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on February 09, 2009 at 08:50:36 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: John's Statement on War posted by Mike Dennis on February 09, 2009 at 08:13:05:
If the "well known book" is one written by Basil Liddell Hart, who, like AR, was a journalist and an object of suspicion to MI5, then the possibilities, again according to Wikipedia, seem to be:
"Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon" (W Blackwood and Sons, London, 1926)
"Great Captains Unveiled" (W. Blackwood and Sons, London, 1927)
"Reputations 10 Years After" (Little, Brown, Boston, 1928)
"The Decisive Wars of History" (1929) (This is the first part of the later "Strategy: the indirect approach")
None of these concern naval warfare, of course, but I suspect that Liddell Hart was already a controversial figure (the "burden of his song", of course, being that almost all the Allied generals in WW1 were at best incompetent - a view which we now tend to accept but which must have been much "harder to take" at the time when both the "victory" and the loss of life and limb were much nearer in time - so any of them might have been "well known" enough to attract even the somewhat un-intellectual John. I have a copy of the last and will undertake to re-read it!