The First World War in photographs

Military history is now a best-selling publishing category, and in recent years there has been a spate of enormously successful books, both fiction and non-fiction, movies and television programmes devoted to it.

Interest in the first of the twentieth century's great military conflicts has been strong, and the First World War's terrible futility has been brilliantly caught in books, movies and in television series, some of them recreating the horrors of the war in dreadful detail, and others, like Joan Littlewood's Oh What A Lovely War! and television's Blackadder Goes Forth., turning it into hugely effective black comedy Following the success of The Second World War in Photographs, the Imperial War Museum is collaborating on a book showcasting 400 of the best black-and-white images from its huge photographic archive, many never before published.

Written by leading military historian Richard Holmes, the book presents the photographs in year-by-year chapters, covering all the great battles of the war and every theatre of operations, from the mud of Flanders to the beaches of Gallipoll. Dramatic, hard hitting, and intensely moving, this will be a unique visual testament to the many millions of men and women who lost their lives in the war, and a reminder to today's younger generations of both the heroism and horror of warfare.