Educated at Abberley Hall School, Winchester College, and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Beevor commanded a troop of tanks in the 11th Hussars in Germany before deciding in 1970 to leave the army and become a writer.

His best-selling books, Stalingrad (1998) and Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002), have been acclaimed for their detailed coverage of the battles between the Soviet Union and Germany, and their focus on the experiences of ordinary people.

They have been praised for their vivid, compelling style, their treatment of the ordinary lives of combatants and civilians, and the use of newly disclosed documents from Soviet archives.

[7][8][9] Berlin proved hugely controversial in Russia because of the information it contained from former Soviet archives about the mass rapes carried out by the Red Army in 1945.

[citation needed] His The Spanish Civil War (1982) was later re-written as The Battle for Spain (2006), keeping the structure and some content from the earlier work, but using the updated narrative style of his Stalingrad book and also adding characters and new archival research from German and Russian sources.

[12][13] Beevor's expertise has been the subject of some commentary; his publications have been praised as revitalizing interest in World War II topics[14] and have allowed readers to reevaluate events such as D-Day from a new perspective.

[19][20][21] Beevor responded by calling the banning "a government trying to impose its own version of history", comparing it to other "attempts to dictate a truth", such as denial of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide.

[citation needed] Beevor, a former chair and member of the Council of the Society of Authors,[23] resigned with Philip Pullman in 2022 in protest over the actions of the CEO and the leadership of the management committee.