Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando - before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. From the spy's cipher to the censor's office, since the advent of modern warfare, literature has all too often been found on the frontline.

In The Book at War, acclaimed historian Andrew Pettegree traces the surprising ways in which written culture has shaped, and been shaped by, the conflicts of the modern age. Beginning with the American Civil War, up to the invasion of Ukraine, Pettegree examines how democracies and their opponents have mobilised a range of literature - from the maps and guidebooks that helped plot the invasion of Normandy to the scientific papers that inspired ever-deadlier weapons of war - to advance their ambitions in battle. Yet books and writers have also played their part on the home front, too, in the imperial propaganda given to schoolboys in England, book burnings across Europe and America, and in the Blitz libraries set up in the London Underground.

The Book at War is the definitive story of how books, writers and readers have gone to war - and how literature has become both a deadly weapon and one of history's most persuasive arguments for peace.