John Keegan

Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan contracted orthopedic tuberculosis as a child, which left him with a permanent limp and prevented him from military service. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, he taught military history at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst for twenty-six years.

In 1976, Keegan published 'The Face of Battle', which bypassed traditional strategic diagrams to reconstruct the actual psychological terror, noise, and physical reality of combat at Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815), and the Somme (1916). He later served as defense editor for The Daily Telegraph and was knighted in 2000.