The first Best Picture: a silent Great War dogfight epic with real biplanes and Clara Bow.
An English family through Dunkirk and the Blitz, made to bring America into the war.
German schoolboys march to the trenches in the film that defined the anti-war picture.
Heart of Darkness up the Nung River, with helicopters and Wagner.
King Lear as a sixteenth-century warlord epic, in Kurosawa's fiercest colour.
A commandant's family keeps a tidy garden on the other side of the Auschwitz wall.
A thief is made to impersonate a dead warlord to hold a clan together.
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.
An American ambulance driver and an English nurse in the Italian war; the retreat from Caporetto.
Paul Baumer and his classmates in the trenches; the German novel of the First World War.
Bardamu through the war, colonial Africa, Detroit and the Paris suburbs; Celine's furious slang.
Orwell fights in the Spanish Civil War, is shot through the throat and sees the revolution betrayed.
Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time between Dresden and Tralfamadore; so it goes.
Three days with guerrillas to blow a bridge in the Spanish Civil War.
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.
Yossarian wants out of the war but only the sane ask, and asking proves you are sane; Heller's loop.
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.
Operation Metro, jets and the Frostbite engine at full volume.
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