A Matter of Life and Death is a collection of new work on the Falklands Conflict by leading authorities in the field, British and Argentine. The themes of the volume are defence and diplomacy, and the problematic relationship between the two. The authors investigate all aspects of the conflict from the relevance of Falklands/Malvinas past, through the diplomatic and military crisis of 1982, to the shifts in public opinion in both countries. Contributors include Peter Beck, Peter Calvert, Alex Danchev, Lawrence Freedman, Virginia Gamba-Stonehouse, Guillermo Makin and Paul Rogers.
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.