If the twentieth century could be said to have had any single decisive watershed, it was surely the Second World War; and if that war could be said, without undue exaggeration, to have had a single decisive time, it was surely December 1941. By then the pattern of the war in the West was set: Germany controlled almost all of Europe, but England was holding out, and the German armies were failing to take Moscow. In Asia the Japanese war in China continued to drag on, its always slender justification long lost to the world’s view by the bloodthirsty behaviour…