Alex Danchev is Professor of International Relations at Keele University, 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 wander 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 (Widenfeld & Nicolson, 1998; Phoenix paperback, 1999) 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; Phoenix paperback, 2002) was listed for the W.H. Smith Prize for Biography. It was also a non-fiction best-seller, for one glorious moment number two to NIGELLA BITES.

After Picasso and Matisse, Braque is the third man of modern art. Together with Picasso, he pioneered the greatest revolution in Western ways of seeing since the Renaissance, and if an ism' can be said to be invented by a person, Cubism was invented by Braque.

In life, a combination of heroic soldier and Zen master, he seemed to survive everything even the shattering of his skull on the Western Front in 1915 but, in death, his story remains untold.

To reveal Braque, as Alex Danchev does here, is to revise Picasso and to illuminate one of the most influential figures in modern art.