Hugh Bicheno

Hugh Bicheno (born 1948) is a political risk analyst and an historian of conflict. He is best known for his revisionist interpretations of the Falklands War, in his best-selling Razor's Edge: The Unofficial History of the Falklands War, and of the American Revolution in Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolutionary War.

Biography

Bicheno was born in Cuba to British parents in 1948. He was educated in Cuba, Chile and Scotland before winning a scholarship to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he won a first class honours degree in History. He was first an academic and then an officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service. Later he became a security consultant in Italy and across Latin America, specializing in kidnap negotiations. He lived in the United States for several years and became a naturalised citizen, but now lives in England. He is bilingual English-Spanish, speaks and reads Italian and French, and can read Portuguese.

Writing

Reviewing Razor's Edge, The Guardian noted that "Bicheno has much to say, highly entertainingly" about the Falklands War, and describes the book as "gripping and discomfiting."

Bicheno collaborated with his friend Richard Holmes on Battlefields of the Second World War, In the Footsteps of Churchill and The World at War. Holmes wrote the prefaces to Rebels and Redcoats and Razor's Edge and also made a television series adaptation of Rebels and Redcoats.

Works

• Gettysburg (Cassell, 2001) ISBN 0-304-35698-0
• Midway (Cassell, 2001) ISBN 0-304-35715-4
• Rebels & Redcoats: The American Revolutionary War (HarperCollins 2003) ISBN 0-00-715625-1
• Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto, 1571 (Cassell, 2003) ISBN 0-304-36319-7
• Razor's Edge: The Unofficial History of the Falklands War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006) ISBN 0-297-84633-7
• Vendetta: High Art and Low Cunning at the Birth of the Renaissance (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008) ISBN 978-0-297-84634-5
• Elizabeth's Sea Dogs: How the English Became the Scourge of the Seas (Conway, 2012) ISBN 978-1-844-86174-3