History: In the 1950s, Time magazine pioneered the use of irrelevant information - "pipe-smoking golf fanatic Gene Autry was wearing his favourite check shirt that morning" - to add colour and bite to a story.
The style remained essentially journalistic for a generation - but now, like a rogue gene, its has crossed disciplines, and everywhere pervades serious history books, and nowhere more prevalently than Gregor Dallas's Poisoned Peace.
Thus the author tells us that President Roosevelt's train was kept in a secret siding underneath the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where the treasury printed greenback dollars. It had been sold to the White House for $1, and had two lifts, and had 12in of reinforced concrete beneath the floor as protection against bombs on the railbed. It had . . . no, no, enough already.
But the author shows us no such mercy, as he remorselessly bombards us with irrelevant facts - thus we learn that US state department employees in 1941 used to eat in Child's restaurant where, for 40 cents they could enjoy pot roast, mashed potatoes and string beans. Style of plate? Compartmented. Colour of plate? Blue. Name of waitress? Maud. (Untrue: waitress unnamed).
This sort of factual assault and battery might make some sort of sense if one knew the subject of the book or could get a sense of its purpose, but one can't. The subtitle, "1945 - The War That Never Ended", suggests that it is a study of the aftermath of the war, when in reality it is a detailed - oh, so detailed - account of the last year or so: the aftermath of the war is dealt with in its final 60 pages in a series of chapters entitled Stalin's Europe, De Gaulle's Europe, and so on.
Now all this might still be forgivable if the "facts" which the author hurls at us were indeed facts. But the Sudetenland was not, as he alleges, a fiction invented by Hitler in the 1930s, but featured extensively in the Versailles talks in 1919. It is not named after the German for south but after the Sudetes Mountains. RAF bomber command did not send P51 Mustangs to escort British bombers over Germany. De Havilland Mosquitoes did not dive-bomb targets like German Stukas (they would have torn their wings off if they had tried).
The most fabulous, amazing error concerns the Takoradi air route across the Atlantic. It was not, as asserted here, instituted by the US in 1941, but had been pioneered by Imperial Airways in 1936. And it was most emphatically not used to bring tanks over the Atlantic and across Africa to the British forces in Egypt. A Sherman tank weighed 30 tons: the standard DC3 transport aircraft could lift a maximum of four tons a few hundred miles. The notion that any aircraft of the time could carry tanks halfway across the world is the most risible I have ever come across in a purportedly serious book.
Moreover, he - and thereby his publisher, who cannot be innocent of any responsibility for his errors - tells us that "Throughout the 1920s and 1930s - in the very face of the Nazi threat - there existed no western military alliance". A Nazi threat in the 1920s? The National Socialists were in such disarray after the failed beer-hall putsch of 1923 that the party had to be re-founded in 1925. It was banned from having public meetings in most of Germany until 1927, and in Prussia (and thus Berlin) until 1928. In the Reich elections of that year, the Nazis gained just 2.6 per cent of the vote. The Reich minister of the interior reported that the party was " numerically insignificant . . . [and is] incapable of exerting any noticeable influence on the great mass of the population and the course of political events".
Only a fortune-teller's crystal ball - or better still, a historian's retrospective perch - could see in the 12 Nazi deputies amongst the 491 in the Reichstag in 1928 a threat to world peace.
Such egregious errors as this disable a work, for they cast a shadow of doubt over every single assertion upon which a reader might be ignorant. So, on the one hand, his understanding of the catastrophe which befell eastern Europe upon its "liberation" by the Soviet Union appears to be commanding and confident. But on the other, when he says that one million people were murdered by the new communist regimes in the people's republics in the five years after the war, how are we to believe him? Is this not the fine fellow who asserted that British armies in Egypt were supplied with tanks by air all the way from the USA?
Moreover, there are other reasons to question the author's judgment. For example, he declares that US Gen Wedemeyer - like himself a subscriber to Mackinder's "heartland" geopolitical theories - "masterminded" the Normandy landings. But this is simply not true. The British had identified two possible places for a return to mainland Europe soon after the debacle at Dunkirk. And whereas it is indubitably true that the Americans were more enthusiastic about opening the second front, it is fanciful to turn the author of a single paper written even before the US entered the war into the "mastermind behind the D-Day landings". And though the term is so dubious as to be almost meaningless, it applies - if anything - either to Lt Gen Frederick Morgan, Gen Bernard Montgomery or Admiral Bertram Ramsay.
In summary, this books tells us many things, but most of all it explains why modern publishing is in such disarray.
Kevin Myers is an author and an Irish Times journalist