Alexander Alekhine, one of the all-time chess greats (comparable perhaps only with Lasker, Capablanca, Botvinnik and Fischer) has long been known to the chess public from his games, but his personality and life story have rarely been written about. The Soviet grandmaster Alexander Kotov is an expert on Alekhine, having published five books in the USSR about him. The present work represents a synthesis of all the work Kotov has done.