I thought I knew quite a bit about the first half of the twentieth century, but this book exposed my ignorance about the two great wars. ( )

A compelling follow-up to The Colour of Time, Marina Amaral and Dan Jones' The World Aflame: The Long War, 1914-1945 nevertheless does not match up to its predecessor. Whereas Colour almost demanded you to pause and soak in each photograph, with its vivid colours of a forgotten age, Aflame's selection doesn't capture the reader in the same way.

In the previous book, the flaws came from Dan Jones, who contributed the writing, rather than from Marina Amaral's colourized photographs. Here, Jones' writing is better, particularly early on, and there was only one glaring factual error (on page 399, he says Karl Dönitz was hanged for war crimes, an error further highlighted by a subsequent photograph on pages 426-7, the caption of which states – correctly, this time – that Dönitz was not hanged but sentenced to prison in the Nuremberg trials).

However, there are some peculiarities: an introduction (written by both Jones and Amaral) ends with a disingenuous and alarmist 'warning' that "the politics of exclusion… are on the march once more" (pg. 9), whilst the book claims that reprisals in 1944 against Nazi collaborators were "notably severe" against French women. This was because of the "rough and misogynistic" public humiliation of "women who were unable to defend themselves" (pg. 379), completely overlooking the fact that male collaborators were executed. The book also finds time to praise Zelda Fitzgerald's novel, of all the things (pg. 164), and dismiss Ernest Hemingway as someone "far better at drinking and showing off" than writing, in contrast to his "far more talented" wife (pg. 377). These are strange hills to die on.

However, the effort to bend over backwards to revise history in line with more 'inclusive' modern norms is something not entirely derisible, if a bit too worthy, and The World Aflame is only following the crowd, not pushing its own agenda. No – what was the greatest surprise in the book was not Jones, but Amaral. In contrast to those surprising and revelatory photographs from The Colour of Time, the selections in The World Aflame just do not 'pop'. You do not stand in awe of them in the way you did in the previous book. Whereas in The Colour of Time you felt history come alive, here you are always aware they are digitally colourized.

The book is far from a failure, and there are many good photos. The colourization of well-known photos (such as Eisenhower with the paratroopers on the eve of D-Day (pg. 360), or the one from Omaha Beach (pg. 360) are very impactful, encouraging you to look at familiar images through a new lens. This could have been done more often; similar opportunities, such as the famous images of the American flag on Iwo Jima or the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, are overlooked in favour of lesser-known photographs from the same events. It is notable that the most affecting photograph in the book is one that Amaral had already popularized on social media some years previously: the heartbreaking image of the frightened young Polish girl in Auschwitz on pages 338-39. For all The World Aflame's efforts, you can't help but think that the choicest photographs had already been used for The Colour of Time. ( )