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

Our pick of the latest military history books

ORTONA, ITALY 20-27 DECEMBER 1943

A new book combines poetry from WW1 with photography from the trenches and home front. Geoff Harris finds out more, including the photo-restoration process

The jungle warfare in the Far East was both a tactical and political challenge for British forces in WWII

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.