Of all the books I have read this year, these are the most moving and memorable; more "people" stories than war stories, in countless voices and moods, of a richness and strength which makes fiction seem meagre

The pressures on a Company Commander are huge and in this book Russell Lewis brings to life most vividly both the intensity of the combat and the depth of care for those under his command. It is a most compelling book that shines new light on the ferocity and the humanity of the Afghanistan conflict. I commend this book to military historians and the general reader alike

A passionate tribute to the Afghan soldiers he fought alongside in Helmand ... a serious piece of work ... excellent

Soldiers who can write are as rare as writers who can strip down a machinegun in forty seconds, but Patrick Hennessey is one of the few

Hennessey is an exceptional talent

This variously tender, ironic and ferocious new voice gives us literature and not propaganda

Hennessey has a reporter's eye for detail and a soldier's nose for bullshit

It's extremely rare to have this level of analytical intelligence combined with brutal first-hand experience

Brilliantly lucid

A compelling history of the seamy realities of war in both Iraq & Afghanistan, it combines the vividness of front-line reporting with detached and incisive analysis. A War of Choice should become a definitive account of this era, setting out the case against Tony Blair's shifty manipulations in Iraq more forcefully than any number of official enquiries will do.

Britain's campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have spawned a new generation of war correspondents as brave and fluent as any that went before, many of whom go on to write books. Jack Fairweather, who reported from Baghdad for The Daily Telegraph, has compiled his own account, which is sound, vivid and [...] simply describes in cool prose how Britain's share in the western allies' initial 2003 success in deposing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq turned into a nightmare struggle against insurgency.

Jack Fairweather, the accomplished correspondent of the Daily Telegraph for much of the Iraq venture, gives a brilliant summary of the British entanglement for the fourth time in that country in A War of Choice... It should provide an ideal introduction to the forthcoming, and much delayed, report about British involvement in Iraq by the Chilcot committee. That inquiry should finally lay bare who took the decisions for what, who knew what and at what time, and who should take responsibility. It won't do all that, we know already, because Sir John Chilcot himself has said he won't apportion blame. He should, and the fact he won't means we will have to rely on Jack Fairweather's pithy analysis for a long time ahead.

The calamitous decision-making process that sent Britain into the "perfect storm" of fighting two wars on two fronts is brilliantly catalogued in Jack Fairweather's excellent book A War of Choice. Through more than 300 interviews, Fairweather, a former Daily Telegraph correspondent in Iraq, expertly dissects the lies, spin and appalling decision-making which led to the biggest British foreign policy disaster since the Suez Crisis.

Cruel Crossing is an accomplished account of an overlooked part of the Second World War. Using wide-ranging research and an impressive number of eye-witness accounts, Stourton tells the story of the escape lines across the Pyrenees, and of the wartime history of southwest France in all its muddied complexity. The gripping escape stories he narrates are sometimes harrowing, often moving, and above all, full of variety and surprises. There is suffering, extraordinary bravery, friendship and even humour; but there is also treachery, betrayal and villainy. A fitting memorial to how war brings out the best and worst in people.

Enthralling stories ... a moving retelling of some of the war's most heroic episodes

Thrilling

Utterly fascinating, and grippingly well-written. With extraordinary skill Wade Davis manages to weave together such disparate strands as Queen Victoria's Indian Raj, the 'Great Game' of intrigue against Russia, the horrors of the Somme, and Britain's obsession to conquer the world's highest peak

Davis’ descriptions of the trenches – the bodies, the smell, the madness – are some of the best I’ve ever read

Sheds new light on history that we thought we knew... meticulously detailed and very readable

The miracle is that there isn’t a dull page. As it moves towards its deadly climax, the story hangs together as tightly as a thriller. Into the Silence is as monumental as the mountain that soars above it; small wonder that it won the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction … Once you start wandering the snowy passes with Mallory and the lads, you won’t want to come down again. There can be no better way, surely, to spend a week in winter

He sees the climbers as haunted dreamers, harrowed by their desperate experiences in the First World War, living amid romantic dreams of Imperial grandeur and the elemental, sublime grandeur of the mountain

This is the awesomely researched story of Mallory, Irvine and the early Everest expeditions. It puts their efforts and motivations into the context of Empire and the first world war in a way I don’t think previous books have ever managed

A vivid depiction of a monumental story…Wade Davis’ passion for the book shines through and I can only hope that his next book doesn’t take as long to write as I will certainly be reading it