Alexander: God, King, Man – gripping biography is a ‘riot from start to finish’

“In 336BC, Alexander was not great,” said Ioan Marc Jones in The Guardian. The newly crowned king of Macedon was a “wiry 20-year-old” seemingly unfit for a new role thrust on him by his father’s assassination.

Desperate to prove his worth, he “led an army into the Persian empire to confront Darius III, a man who ruled more than 50 million people”. Alexander was heavily outnumbered and “dissent rattled through his ranks”. Improbably, he defeated Darius, and went on to conquer “vast tracts of the world”. In this “brilliant” book, which last week won the 2026 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, Edmund Richardson, a classics professor at Durham University, tells the “story of that legend”.

By necessity, it’s a “violent read, tracking one conquest after the next”. Yet Richardson has a “light touch”, and the book is “all the better” for its many diversions – including an “especially fascinating” chapter on Alexandria (which Alexander founded in 331BC) and the library built there 50 years later. No “staid history of chalkboards”, this is a “riot from start to finish”.

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As a military strategist, Alexander was unrivalled, said Rupert Christiansen in The Telegraph. A “master of cool tactical calculation”, he helped pioneer the “phalanx model”, in which spear-wielding “squadrons of infantry, packed close” and “locked together by their shields”, were organised into a “relentless killing machine”. But in other ways, he was less admirable. “He did not dispense justice or govern wisely” and, for the most part, left only “devastation in his wake”. Even before his death, aged 32 (probably from typhoid), his “vast empire” was collapsing. Historians have generally been “too kind” to this “chillingly heroic figure”. Richardson’s “finely crafted” book takes us “closer to the truth”.

This is a curious “hybrid” – “part novel, part biography”, said James Romm in the Times Literary Supplement. Richardson “freely imagines Alexander’s emotions” – before the crucial battle of Issus, we are told, the young man tried to “ready himself for death” – and he rarely mentions the many contradictions in the sources. For an “accomplished scholar”, this seems “strange”.

On the contrary, this is an object lesson in “how history can be both academically ambitious and readable”, said The Economist. For too long, historians have “not tried hard enough to rivet readers”. With its plethora of “delicious” details, and refreshing lack of “hand-wringing”, this book triumphantly bucks the trend.