Richard A Cohen (born 9 May 1947) is a retired British fencer who competed at three Olympic Games and the author of four books, "Making History, The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past," Chasing the Sun, the story of man's relationship to that star, "How to Write Like Tolstoy, A Journey into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers,"and By the Sword, a history of sword fighting. He is the founder of the book publisher Richard Cohen Books. Fencing career Cohen was born in Birmingham, England, to a Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother. He learned to fence while at Downside School, near Bath. He was a five times British fencing champion, winning the sabre title at the British Fencing Championships in 1974, 1980, 1982, 1986 and 1987. He was selected for the British team in four Olympics from 1972 to 1984, although he did not compete at the Moscow Olympics because of a sporting boycott. He was Commonwealth sabre champion in 1982 and won the prestigious Paris Open in 1981. He represented England and won a gold medal in the team sabre and a bronze medal in the individual sabre, at the 1970 British Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh, Scotland, Cohen was World Veterans' Sabre Champion in 2004, 2005, 2008 and 2009 and has been European sabre champion nine times, making him the most successful single-weapon fencer of veteran fencing. He won the national veteran saber championships a record fourteen times. Publishing career While competing as a fencer, he worked for book publishers, editing much of the early work of Jeffrey Archer, as well as John le Carre, Anthony Burgess, Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks and Fay Weldon. In 1985 he became publishing director of Hutchinson and in 1992 of Hodder & Stoughton. In 1995 he founded his own publishers, Richard Cohen Books, which won the Sunday Times Small publisher of the Year award in 1998. In 1991 and 1992 he was program director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, recording world record audiences of over 30,000 both years, and from 2000 till 2007 was a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Kingston-upon-Thames in London, England. Since moving to America in 1999, he has edited the No. 1 bestseller Leadership by Rudy Giuliani, all seven books by Madeleine Albright, David Boies' Courting Justice, and the Pulitzer Prizewinning biography of Malcolm X by Manning Marable. Cohen wrote a history of