‘How to make a man do what he doesn’t want to do’ - the definition of leadership, as agreed by two very different men. The US president, Harry Truman. And the newly-promoted head of the British army, Montgomery of Alamein.

But Monty had been having to learn to agree with men unlike himself, ever since his sudden emergence as victorious commander of the Commonwealth force in Egypt. For as a junior officer, he had been noted for his narrow social range, literally incapable of making conversation with anyone not from his own background of public school, Sandhurst and the regular army. And we can detect signs of that narrowness here. For example, in the whole story, there is barely a mention of any soldier below the rank of General. Yet he had spent his career surrounded by thousands of men of all ranks. What about those five years as a subaltern in India? Was there not a single man in the battalion that he found notable? Not that we can see. And this seems to signal the essential loneliness reflected by his life-story.

Try this incredibly self-serving claim: “I was promoted to command the 5th Corps and from that time begins my real influence on the training of the Army… I was transferred to command the 12th Corps in Kent… So the ideas and the doctrine of war gradually spread along the south of England to the mouth of the Thames.” But that word ‘training’ gives us a clue to his special quality (which was certainly not strategic brilliance). For Monty had precisely one talent, but he had it in very great measure. He was the best sports team coach anyone had seen, the busy little bully who could ginger-up the squad and make it win.

It came at the expense of any other capabilities that might be described as talents. Writing, for example. The book is readable enough, as a quick-march resumé of a military career - perhaps remarkably so, given his poor early education - but we are looking at clarity, rather than style. He is surprisingly honest about his unhappy start in life, as the only one of nine children to be rejected by his mother, and freely admitting that it turned him into an obnoxious little boy, forced to be grimly self-reliant.

As for the accuracy of the book as a whole, we should remember the old adage that nothing sounds more like the truth than a British soldier telling a lie. From his account, we might infer that he and his mother eventually buried the hatchet, but he actually sent her away from Windsor Castle when she’d been hoping to watch him installed as Knight of the Garter. President Eisenhower never spoke to him again after reading the book, so you can make what you will of that. Auchinleck threatened a lawsuit, so the second edition had to carry an erratum notice. And his report of his marriage, and how it came about, is totally sanitised. But if all’s fair in love and war, then of course he is doubly licensed to lie his head off.