War, Virilio often remarks, was his university. Everything, we might say, progressed from there. A child coming of age during the Second World War, Virilio was ten years old when he witnessed the massive bombing of the French city of Nantes by the Allied air forces that destroyed 8,000 buildings. Moreover, after the French Resistance assassinated the Nazi Kommandantur in Nantes, the Germans rounded up hostages and shot them. One hostage was from the street where Virilio lived. In another incident, a Nazi sailor shot a childhood sweetheart in the eye as she looked out from a terrace after curfew. He (Virilio and Richard 2012: 13–14) observes of this period that he was a child of war:

Later, as a conscript, Virilio served in the French Army in Algeria, rising to the rank of sergeant.

Virilio's earliest academic studies were also of military architecture during the Second World War (1994a [1975]), which became, fi rst, an essay in 1958, then a book and a museum exhibition in 1975. His explorations of the spaces of war led him to a close analysis of the role of technology and speed in war (and culture in general). Space (especially urban), technology and speed (often conceptualised in terms of the ‘race’, as in arms race, and analysed under the heading of dromology), along with information, perception (vision) and the accident have been the major themes he has used to illuminate the contours of contemporary confl ict and vice versa. In short, many of his works focus on war and none of them ignores it.