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Max Hastings’s review (subscriber protected) of Andrew Roberts’s new book Masters and Commanders: The Military Geniuses Who Led the West to Victory in World War IIrams home the true nature of the Second World War. We think of it as a national triumph - and of course it was. Yet victory was only made possible by the immense sacrifice of Soviet troops. Four out of every five Germans killed in action died on the Eastern front. Russian losses were much higher.

A key tactical moment in the course of the war was the decision by Roosevelt and Churchill to pursue the Mediterranean strategy, attacking targets in North Africa rather than in continental Europe. Hastings writes:

Marshall admitted after the war that he and his colleagues did not understand, as did Roosevelt and Churchill, the importance of military theater: of commitments that might not be strategically decisive or even relevant, but that sustained a semblance of momentum in the Western Allied war effort.

Irrelevant victories to sustain momentum? Battles of perception? It is incredible how, on closer examination, even the bloodiest combats begin to look like confidence wars.

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Reading Michel Foucault’s superb essay on the uses of history: “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (pdf). I particularly liked these lines:

Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalised; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them.

I have a theory about this. It is: that the tidal waves of passive-aggression that sweep across offices is the result of just the kind of rule perversion that Foucault describes. The rules specify that aggression is bad; so people use these rules to oppress each other. Ever so politely, of course - but, frankly, I’d prefer a punch in the face to an “I’ll let you get back to it…”

[See also: How to apologise]

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I’ve just finished a piece on unemployment and confidence for the RSA Journal. While I was procrastinating, I read Eamon Duffy’s review of Keith Thomas’s new book in the LRB (subscriber protected). One passage made an interesting contrast to what I was writing:

People in our society think of unemployment as a curse, and derive much of their identity and satisfaction from work. But Thomas begins his chapter on work and vocation by exploring the conventional early modern view that work was at best a necessary evil.

For classical Greence the best life was one of leisure, “not idleness, of course, but virtuous activity of mind and body, involving no manual albour and unconstrained by the need to earn a living”. For ancient Christianity, work was the “primal curse”, inflicted on humankind as a punishment for the Fall.

Both classical and Christian orthodoxies informed early modern attitudes, so that the devoutly Protestant John Locke could assert on both counts that “labour for labour’s sake is against nature”. There would be no work in heaven.

Have a good weekend everyone.

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