I’m very much enjoying reading Jim Lacy’s [amazon_link id=”1591144914″ target=”_blank” ]Keep From All Thoughtful Men: How US Economists Won World War II[/amazon_link]. Although it’s a book written by an obsessive, it appeals to my magpie-like delight in trivia. The first chapter starts with a moan about military historians’ lack of interest in logistics and statistics rather than blood and machines. “After all,” the author writes, “Who really wants to read about how many trains it took to move ammunition to the front in 1916, or about the hay consumption rate of one of Murat’s cavalry divisions?” Me! I do! That’s exactly the kind of thing I want to know!

[amazon_image id=”1591144914″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Keep From All Thoughtful Men[/amazon_image]

It’s also possible to divine the plot of a stylish drama set in the Washington and London of 1941 as the Americans debated their strategy toward the European conflict and the potential Pacific threat. There is American statistician Stacy May travelling from London via Dublin back across the Atlantic with a huge 35lb volume containing a comprehensive set of accounts of the US and UK productive capacity at the time: “It was a German spy’s ultimate fantasy: a plump, fortyish, dignified, preoccupied American statistician, all alone and carrying what everyone who knew of its existence considered the most important document in the world.”

There is the debonair Frenchman Jean Monnet, later celebrated (or otherwise, according to taste) as the founding architect of the European Community, arriving in Washington in late 1940, urging the American administration to throw US resources into the war effort. While there he mingled with Washington society, including Phil and Katherine Graham of the Washington Post. He had an affair with Katherine Graham, or so she heavily hints in her superb memoir [amazon_link id=”1842126202″ target=”_blank” ]Personal History[/amazon_link]. She writes of Monnet: “The thrill for me of being with him never disappeared as long as he lived. He was energetic and interesting, and I can testify to his virility.”

[amazon_image id=”0375701044″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Personal History: Katharine Graham[/amazon_image]

Surely there’s the equivalent of an Alan Furst novel in these scenes, not [amazon_link id=”0753828987″ target=”_blank” ]Mission to Paris [/amazon_link]but Mission to Washington? All this, and I haven’t yet got to the section about Simon Kuznets and the national accounts. Fabulous.

[amazon_image id=”0753828987″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Mission to Paris[/amazon_image]

One of the interesting aspects of Tony Judt’s [amazon_link id=”009956355X” target=”_blank” ]Thinking the 20th Century[/amazon_link] (which I’ve nearly finished) is the insider-outsider perspective he has on England. He grew up in London, the son of an immigrant father and second generation immigrant mother, and emigrated to the US in his late 20s. So he has a nice combination of familiarity and objectivity about his birthplace (and I mean England, not the UK, as he has a very London-centric view).

Given that I spent my teenage years in a small Lancashire mill town pining to be a philosopher sitting in a French cafe, I was particularly taken with Judt’s comments about the way the English dismiss intellectuals – ‘English intellegentsia’ is not a meaningful social concept. His hypothesis is “that the intellectual agenda which drove ideologically configured political movements in continental Europe was quite absent in London.” This lack of ideology was a blessing for most of the 20th century. As Judt points out, the penalty Eric Hobsbawm paid for being a lifelong Communist was no more serious than having to be a professor at the University of London rather than Cambridge. That tolerance would surely not have played out in the same way on the Continent.

There is also a nice passage describing the way the furthest reaches of Empire – George Orwell’s Burma, India, the Caribbean – seem comfortable and familiar to the English thanks to language and cultural references, whereas the Continent seems wildly exotic. Even for Shakespeare the “coast of Bohemia” was a mysterious distant land, and as for Slovenia or Bulgaria, or even the longingly imagined Paris of my adolescence….

[amazon_image id=”009956355X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Thinking the Twentieth Century[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”0140004564″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Burmese Days[/amazon_image]