Footnotes to myself

Slim the Standardbearer, by Ronald Lewin

For a while now I’ve kept extensive reading notes. A few of the quotes, ideas, and observations are thrown into what I write, but a lot never finds a place.

This series is my attempt to make use of that surplus. Not quite a book review, but not quite a summary either; something a little more like marginalia. Here are the bits I underlined, and here’s why I thought they were worth underlining. Some of it will be thematic, some of it fragmentary, all of it deliberately loose. Enjoy.

Slim the Standardbearer, by Ronald Lewin

After listening to a long podcast series from We Have Ways about the Arakan, I realised I knew nothing about the Burma campaign or Slim himself. I don’t like political biographies, but I’m not averse to military ones. The strategy of winning battles makes for far more interesting reading than the endless recounting of meetings that most political biographies now consist of.

Genuine humility combined with some inner uncertainty to prevent him from seeing that he would never want for appropriate employment. The truly humble man is so rare a specimen that when one appears he lacks credibility; Sim was just such a person—not humble before God in the religious sense, but simply a human being devoid of vanity, self-complacency, folie de grandeur. He was certainly not short of ambition or worldly wisdom, but neither tarnished his integrity nor made him pitch his hopes too high.

I found Slim an interesting character; it seems the only people who didn’t like him were his incompetent superior officers who were presumably worried he would expose their deficiencies simply through his proficiency.