By the Sword

Richard Cohen is the former publishing director of Hutchinson and Hodder & Stoughton and the author of Chasing the Sun, By the Sword, and How To Write Like Tolstoy. Works he has edited have gone on to win the Pulitzer, Booker and Whitbread/Costa prizes, and twenty-one have been #1 bestsellers. For more than 35 years he has written, edited, and lectured on numerous subjects around the world, from talks on the Queen Mary 2 to the First World War battlefields of France and Belgium. For seven years he was a visiting professor in creative writing at the university of Kingston-upon-Thames in London. Among the authors he has edited are Madeleine Albright, Vanessa Redgrave, Sebastian Faulks, Studs Terkel, John Keegan, Richard Holmes, John le Carre, Jeffrey Archer, Sir Harold Evans, Tony Benn, Barbara Castle, William Trevor, Kingsley Amis and Fay Weldon. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. For two years he was program director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, and during his tenure it became the largest book festival in the world. Five times U.K. national saber champion, Cohen was selected for the British Olympic fencing team in 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1984 and has been four times world veteran champion. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Book Review and most British quality newspapers.

'Carefully researched and written with sense and wit, this history is more than just about the weapon whose use for centuries helped define what it was to be a proper man, it also comes close to being an account of gentlemanly manners all over the world. The author himself was a national sabre champion; it's not often you come across a man equally at home with both sword and pen.' Sunday Telegraph 28/2 'Richard Cohen's endlessly engrossing history of the sword and those who wielded it takes us from the Minoans to the modern day with utmost erudition and authority, laced with apposite and often startling anecdotes and asides -- while it somehow comes as no surprise that fascist such as Benito Mussolini and Oswald Mosley were keen fencers...Cohen is equally eye-opening about the dark arts of match-rigging and cheating in competition, and he should know, as a five-time UK sabre champion who also competed in four Olympics. His pen is equally as mighty as his sword.' Independent on Sunday 28/2