Our pick of the latest military history books

Capturing the immediacy of fighting and the writhing bodies of soldiers, as well as keeping narrative clarity, proved enormously difficult for painters depicting battles before the advent of photography. Michael Hall reveals how they rose to the challenge

Middleland: Dispatches from the Borders Rory Stewart (Jonathan ...

All serious scholarship on ancient Sparta has to be conducted within the penumbra of the ‘mirage Spartiate’, a French term coined in 1933 to describe the problem posed by idealised accounts of Sparta.

Review of reviews: Books

Over a long career, John Hardman has specialised to great effect in teasing out, from speeches, decrees, minutes, memoranda, letters, diaries and unsent drafts, the varied moods of French political de