BBC
For a younger generation of Britons, the first encounter with the Great War often came either in the pages of Taylor's history, or through a Bank Holiday television repeat of the 1969 film of 'Oh What a Lovely War'.

Having grown up with the version of the war popular since the 1940s, younger audiences often took these works as factual. At school, many came to the war through English lessons, where a small group of war poets were taught in an historical vacuum.

Sassoon and Wilfred Owen could be used to evoke an emotional reaction against war which engaged students and satisfied teachers, but which utterly misrepresented the feelings of most Britons who lived through the war years.

The extent to which this mythology was shared made it an attractive setting for television series and historical novels. Many jokes in the 1989 BBC TV series 'Blackadder Goes Forth' relied on the audience understanding that the war meant stupid generals, pointless attacks and universal death.

Similarly, authors such as Sebastian Faulks could rely on an emotional tenor of tragedy created by a wartime setting. Although works like Faulks' 'Birdsong' are fiction, audiences often believed that they communicated 'deeper truths' about the war, because they reflected their own misconceptions.

The self-reinforcing power of these myths gives them tremendous power. Since the 1980s, a boom in carefully conducted archival investigation has done much to uncover the war's complexity: how it was fought and won by the British army on the Western Front, how domestic support and dissent were encouraged and managed, and how the war was remembered.

Yet this academic research has had almost no impact on popular understanding. This should not be a cause for despair or disdain. Societies have always misrepresented the past in an attempt to understand the present.