James Clavell was a British-American novelist, screenwriter and director best known for the Asian Saga — King Rat (1962), Tai-Pan (1966), Shōgun (1975) and Noble House (1981). He encountered Sun Tzu in Hong Kong in the 1970s and in 1983 issued his own edition of The Art of War, adapting Lionel Giles’s 1910 translation and adding a fervent foreword urging that the book be made required reading for every officer and politician. That foreword’s closing line is the reason millions of people now believe Sun Tzu wrote a sentence he never wrote.