Every battle is different. Each takes place in a different context – the war, the campaign, the weapons. However, battles across the centuries, whether fought with sticks and stones or advanced technology, have much in common. Fighting is, after all, an intensely human affair; human nature doesn’t change. So why were battles fought as they were? What gave them their shape? Why did they go as they did: victory for one side, defeat for the other?

In exploring six significant feats of arms – the war and campaign in which they each occurred, and the factors that determined their precise form and course – The Shape of Battle answers these fundamental questions about the waging of war.

Hastings (1066) – everyone knows the date, but not, perhaps, the remarkable strategic background.
Towton (1461) – the bloodiest battle to be fought on English soil.
Waterloo (1815) – more written about in English than any other but rarely in its true context as the culminating battle in the longest war in ‘modern’ times.
D-Day (1944) – a battle within a larger operation (‘Overlord’), and the longest-planned and most complex offensive battle in history.
Imjin River (1951) – this little known battle of the Korean War was the British Army’s last large-scale defensive battle.
Operation Panther’s Claw (2009) – a battle that has yet to receive the official distinction of being one: an offensive conducted over six weeks with all the trappings of 21st-century warfare yet whose shape and face at times resembled the Middle Ages.

The Shape of Battle is not a polemic, it doesn’t try to argue a case. It lets the narratives – the battles – speak for themselves.

Every battle is different. Each takes place in a different context – the war, the campaign, the weapons. However, battles across the centuries, whether fought with sticks and stones or advanced technology, have much in common. Fighting is, after all, an intensely human affair; human nature doesn’t change. So why were battles fought as they were? What gave them their shape? Why did they go as they did: victory for one side, defeat for the other?

In exploring six significant feats of arms – the war and campaign in which they each occurred, and the factors that determined their precise form and course – The Shape of Battle answers these fundamental questions about the waging of war.

Hastings (1066) – everyone knows the date, but not, perhaps, the remarkable strategic background.
Towton (1461) – the bloodiest battle to be fought on English soil.
Waterloo (1815) – more written about in English than any other but rarely in its true context as the culminating battle in the longest war in ‘modern’ times.
D-Day (1944) – a battle within a larger operation (‘Overlord’), and the longest-planned and most complex offensive battle in history.
Imjin River (1951) – this little known battle of the Korean War was the British Army’s last large-scale defensive battle.
Operation Panther’s Claw (2009) – a battle that has yet to receive the official distinction of being one: an offensive conducted over six weeks with all the trappings of 21st-century warfare yet whose shape and face at times resembled the Middle Ages.

The Shape of Battle is not a polemic, it doesn’t try to argue a case. It lets the narratives – the battles – speak for themselves.

We remember months, because months have names, because they are linked to the seasons, and because they have their own character. Looking at the First World War month by month reveals its complexity while preserving a sense of time.

From the opening shots to the signing of the armistice, the First World War lasted almost 52 months. It was fought on land, sea and in the air. It became industrial, and unrestricted: poison gas, aerial bombing of cities, and the sinking without warning of merchantmen and passenger ships by submarines.

Casualties, military and civilian, probably exceeded 40 million. Four empires collapsed during the course of the war – the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman.

The First World War is almost impossible to comprehend. Day-by-day narratives can be dizzying for the reader wanting to make sense of the conflict as a whole. Freer-flowing accounts, while helping to understand the broader trends and factors, can give less of a sense of the human dimension of time. The month is a more digestible gauge.

Based on the Allan Mallinson’s monthly commentaries in The Times throughout the centenary, Fight to the Finish is a new and original portrait of “The War to End War.”

On of Britain’s foremost military historians and defence experts tackles the origins – and the opening first few weeks of fighting – of what would become known as ‘the war to end all wars’. Intensely researched and convincingly argued, Allan Mallinson explores and explains the grand strategic shift that occurred in the century before the war, the British Army’s regeneration after its drubbings in its fight against the Boer in South Africa, its almost calamitous experience of the first twenty days’ fighting in Flanders to the point at which the British Expeditionary Force – the ‘Old Contemptibles’ – took up the spade in the middle of September 1914: for it was then that the war changed from one of rapid and brutal movement into the more familiar vision of trench warfare on Western Front. In this vivid, compelling new history, Malliinson brings his experience as a professional soldier to bear on the circumstances, events, actions and individuals and speculates – tantalizingly – on what might have been…