El Alamein was the World War II land battle Britain had to win. By the summer of 1942 Rommel's German forces were threatening to sweep through the Western Desert and drive on to the Suez Canal, and Britain was in urgent need of military victory. Then, in October, after 12 days of attritional tank battle and artillery bombardment, Montgomery's Eighth Army, with Australians and New Zealanders playing crucial roles in a genuinely international Allied fighting force, broke through the German and Italian lines at El Alamein. It was a turning-point in the war after which, in Churchill's words, "we never had a defeat". Stephen Bungay's book is as much at home analysing the crucial logistics of keeping desert armies supplied with petrol and tank parts as it is reappraising the combat strategies of Montgomery and Rommel, and ranges widely from the domestic political pressures on Churchill to the aerial siege of Malta, key to the control of the Mediterranean. And in a chapter on "The Soldier's War", Bungay graphically evokes the phantasmagoric blur of thunderous cannonade and tormenting heat that was the lot of the individual men who actually fought and died in the desert.

Stephen Bungay was born in Kent in 1954 and educated at Oxford and Tübingen. He has spent his career working for the Boston Consulting Group in London and Munich as a chief executive in an insurance company. He is now working in executive education, specialising in military history and modern management practice. His first book, The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain, published by Aurum in 2001 has now become accepted as the definitive book on the subject. His subsequent book, Alamein, also published by Aurum, was praised by Lawrence James in the Daily Mail as a brilliant balance between lucid analysis and piquant detail', and by John Lukacs in the Los Angeles Times as terse and brilliantly written by a thorough master of his subject'. He regularly appears on TV documentaries about the Second World War. He lives in Kent.