‘Film critic’ rather undersells the breadth and depth of David Thomson’s engagement with the medium. A distinguished historian, biographer, novelist, and encyclopedist of film, he has also made documentaries, written screenplays, and been a respected judge on the international film festival circuit. He is widely regarded as the greatest living writer on film. It is fitting, then, that after more than twenty books on cinema he has finally turned his attention to war, a matter whose scope and import across the history of film provides a true match for his gifts.

Ironically, in light of this impressive resumé, Thomson’s key experience of war came as a participant, not an observer, when, as a child in early 1940s London, his parents’ home in South London was bombed by the Luftwaffe. This experience was ‘invaluable’, he reflected in later life, not only in teaching him how ‘a state of war had always been there’, but in providing perspective on his own and Britain’s privations: ‘We were not invaded, or put out on the streets as refugees; we were not sent to camps … Our outrages were very small compared with those that were available not far away.’ This insight organises, illuminates, and sharpens Thomson’s analysis of how, over more than a century, cinema has restaged and recreated war, the moral and historical artifices this has entailed, the misleading narratives it has generated, and the dangers that lie therein for all of us.