Early on in Generation Kill Evan Wright refers to the novel Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield which records the heroic Spartan clash with the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 BC. Possibly Evan Wright has sub-consciously absorbed the style of Gates of Fire and translated it into the setting of modern Iraq (Wright is as good a writer as Pressfield). For all the descriptions of military squalor, cynical attitudes and lethal incompetence, Evan Wright portrays his subjects in an idealised and heroic mode.

Another literary parallel would be the Alexiad of Anna Comnena (I’m thinking of the episode when the crusaders arrive in Constantinople – a brutal Western intrusion into an effete and autocratic Eastern city). A couple of years ago I found an old and battered novel Private Angelo by war journalist Eric Linklater. It was a fictional account of the Allied invasion of Italy in 1944. As Linklater was a participant in the campaign I was expecting it to be filled with realistic detail. Instead it was a sentimental and entirely unconvincing portrayal. Although I finished the book (as per my rule of finishing every book I start) I did not enjoy the experience. Not to be compared with the writing of Alan Moorehead.