The fashion for writing about decisive battles in history began, perhaps, with the Ancient Greeks; but the modern genre was created by the British historian and lawyer E S Creasy, with his Fifteen Decisive Battles of the Western World (1850).
His successor in Britain was the former soldier and military theorist J F C Fuller, who greatly expanded Creasy’s list in The Decisive Battles of the Western World and their Influence upon History (1954-1956).
The American historian Cathal J Nolan, in his recent The Allure of Battle (2017), provides evidence of the popularity of the genre in a footnote that contains references to 18 recent works, all of which contain the word ‘battle’ in the title.
War Classics – 1066: the year of the conquest