Book description
The Mask of Command is about generals: who they are, what they
do and how they affect the world we live in. Through portraits of four
generals - archetypal hero Alexander the Great, anti-hero Wellington,
the unheroic Ulysses S. Grant and the false heroic of Hitler - John
Keegan propounds the view of heroism in warfare as inextricable linked
with the political imperative of the age and place. He demonstrates
how the role of the general alters with the ethos of the society that
creates him and concludes that there is no place for heroism in a
nuclear world.
The Mask of Command is a companion volume to John Keegan's
classic study of the individual soldier, The Face of Battle:
together they form a masterpiece of military and human history.
John Keegan, who was knighted in the Millennium Honours List, was the
Defence Editor of the
Daily Telegraph
and Britain's foremost military historian. The Reith Lecturer in 1998,
he authored many bestselling books including
The Face of Battle
,
The Mask of Command
,
The Second World War
,
A History of Warfare
(awarded the Duff Cooper Prize),
The First World War
,
Intelligence in War, The American Civil War
and
The Iraq War
. He died in 2012.
