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]