A great deal has been written about tactical play in the game of Diplomacy, but hardly anything on the best approaches to the negotiation side of the game. And yet it is the person-to-person interactions that give the game its distinctive character and which create the most interesting challenges. How do you form strong alliances? How can you tell if an ally is about to stab? Are there techniques you can use to break up the strong alliance of your opponents? In the Art of Correspondence in the Game of Diplomacy, Conor Kostick discusses these issues and many more. Through an in-depth analysis of the full correspondence of two classic games and through dozens of other examples, he offers a unique insight into what makes for effective negotiation in the game. This highly original contribution to the study of the game of Diplomacy is for readers who wish to improve their own play or who will enjoy witnessing the normally secret workings of the game, as players steer towards victory or disaster. Conor Kostick is an award winning military historian and novelist. He was an outright winner of Manorcon, one of Diplomacy's Grand Prix tournaments, and he was a member of the Irish Diplomacy team that won the world correspondence team championship in 2012.

Aron Nimzovich was one of the strongest players of chess in the world and was definitely the strongest writer about chess in the world. His books "My System," Chess Praxis" and "Die Blockade" have been studied at an early age by virtually every strong chess player in the world. Nimzovich was Russian Champion in 1913 jointly with Alexander Alekhine at St.Petersburg. He won a string of international events in the mid-1920s which led him to challenge Jose Raul Capablanca to a World Championship match in 1925, but negotiations failed after monetary backing could not be found. He took first place at Copenhagen (1923), Dresden (1926), Karlsbad (1929) and Frankfurt (1930). He is credited with being one of the principal inventors and developers of the Hypermodern School of Chess. The Hypermodern idea is to allow the opponent to occupy the center and then chip aware at it from the sides until it collapses. Nimzovitch is credited with inventing the Queen's Indian Defense and the Nimzo-Indian Defense, two of the most popular defenses played at the world championship level today. There are many opening and variations named after Nimzovich.