•The Greatest Day In History, Nicholas Best, published in paperback by Phoenix, price £8.99.

•The First World War, Martin Gilbert, published in paperback by Phoenix, price £15.99.

•Aces Falling, Peter Hart, published in paperback by Phoenix, price £8.99.

•We Will Not Fight, Will Elsworth-Jones, published in paperback by Aurum, price £8.99.

IT ENDED almost exactly 90 years ago, its veterans have nearly all gone, yet it continues to fascinate and horrify us.

The First World War touched families right across Britain. Its final year saw some of the most dramatic, intense and costly action of the fighting on the Western Front.

Even when the Allies believed they would win, they expected the conflict to continue into 1919, and the Germans clung to the hope of hanging on to their conquests until almost the bitter end.

Nicholas Best has charted the last week of the war, from November 4 to 11, 1918, looking at not only the remarkable events of those seven days but also a range of individuals who experienced them, from Winston Churchill to Marlene Dietrich.

The author doesn’t refrain from judgement. Hardly anyone on the German side comes out well, from the deluded Kaiser and his generals, desperately trying to avoid blame for the catastrophe, to the politicians jockeying for power, and the revolutionaries jumping at the chance to have their own Bolshevik uprising.

He explains why the fighting carried on even as peace beckoned, as the Allies suspected – correctly – the Germans would try to use a ceasefire to regain their strength. It was, as the future Edward VIII observed, “rotten luck” for those killed at this late stage, including poet Wilfred Owen, three men who survived the first British battle at Mons in 1914 only to be killed while watching the city’s recapture, and George Ellison from Leeds, probably the last British soldier to die.

The method is a little contrived at times, the hindsight perhaps a little overdone (he ends with a distraught Corporal Hitler blaming the Jews for Germany’s plight), but this is an invigorating and often enlightening read.

If you want a comprehensive, chronological account of the war, look no further than Martin Gilbert’s republished book. Aptly subtitled “a complete history”, the book sweeps across every theatre of conflict and is replete with detail, reflecting Gilbert’s view that the human stories of war are more important than the debates about it.

Peter Hart’s Aces Falling explains the rise of the phenomenon of the flying ace, providing a seemingly heroic counterpoint to the industrial warfare beneath them.

But their world was swept away in the cauldron of 1918, as the intensity of the fighting increased, and the emphasis of the air war switched from scouting and aerial combat to bombing and support of ground attacks, presaging the methods of the Second World War.

A different kind of heroism is explored by Will Elsworth-Jones, who recounts the little-known and often shocking tale of the experience of British conscientious objectors, focusing on the Brocklesby family from South Yorkshire.

One brother, Bert, was sentenced to death for refusing to support the war effort, while another, Philip, fought on the Somme. Both survived, but not everyone did; two conscientious objectors committed suicide in York, more victims of an all-consuming war.