With Remembrance Sunday upon us, the issue takes a close look at the Battle of the Somme.

Almost half a million British casualties transformed popular perceptions of war forever. Official ‘remembrance’ is one of the legacies. Could the carnage have been avoided? Was there an alternative to trench-war stalemate?

Nick Hewitt’s piece on Taranto -the ‘dress rehearsal’ for Pearl Harbour -provides a sharp contrast: a brilliant, fast, devastating carrier attack on the Italian Fleet at anchor in November 1940 that transformed the war in the Mediterranean.

What are the lessons of the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878-1880? We continue our short series on earlier British adventures in Afghanistan.

Also in this issue, we have a full analysis of the battle that saved western civilisation exactly 2,500 years ago. We describe what happened, blow by blow, when 10,000 Greek farmers faced an army of 25,000 professional Persian soldiers at Marathon in 490 BC.