The first Best Picture: a silent Great War dogfight epic with real biplanes and Clara Bow.
German schoolboys march to the trenches in the film that defined the anti-war picture.
A thief is made to impersonate a dead warlord to hold a clan together.
A commandant's family keeps a tidy garden on the other side of the Auschwitz wall.
How the Death Star plans were stolen; the saga's best war film.
King Lear as a sixteenth-century warlord epic, in Kurosawa's fiercest colour.
Heart of Darkness up the Nung River, with helicopters and Wagner.
A girl joins an army where every soldier has a secret; Pratchett on war.
Sacco in a Bosnian enclave during the war; the second reportage comic.
Michael Herr's Vietnam, in the language the soldiers used; the best book about that war.
T. E. Lawrence's own account of the Arab Revolt.
The first month of the First World War day by day; Tuchman's Pulitzer that Kennedy read during the missile crisis.
Soldiers return from each battle to an Earth centuries older; Haldeman's Vietnam in space.
Mobile infantry against the Bugs and a lecture on citizenship; Verhoeven turned it inside out.
Warlords, strategists and the fall of the Han; the Chinese epic every game borrows.
The Biafran war through twins, a houseboy and an Englishman.
Three days with guerrillas to blow a bridge in the Spanish Civil War.
Yossarian wants out of the war but only the sane ask, and asking proves you are sane; Heller's loop.
Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time between Dresden and Tralfamadore; so it goes.
An idiot, or a genius, in the Austro-Hungarian army; the funniest book about a war.
V-2 rockets, a lieutenant whose erections predict strikes and the end of the war; Pynchon's monster.
Orwell fights in the Spanish Civil War, is shot through the throat and sees the revolution betrayed.
Bardamu through the war, colonial Africa, Detroit and the Paris suburbs; Celine's furious slang.
Paul Baumer and his classmates in the trenches; the German novel of the First World War.
An American ambulance driver and an English nurse in the Italian war; the retreat from Caporetto.
Fifty days of the Trojan War, the rage of Achilles and the death of Hector; the first book of the West.
The same tiny squads sent into space and back through history, with the graveyard on the hill still filling up.
Squads, a commander calling in artillery and 64 players on Karkand; the modern-combat Battlefield.
El Alamein, Stalingrad and Normandy, with regenerating health for the first time.
The reboot: Piccadilly, the embassy and night-vision raids.
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