Fuller's biographer, Bryan Holden Reid, has described The Second World War as "an analysis of the breakdown, as Fuller saw it, of the vital relationship between grand strategy and grand tactics—the end and the means...Too often books on the Second world War detail the movements of formations about the battlefield and give space to strategical commentary without assessing the manner in which the war was actually fought. On the tactical level, The Second World War can still be read with profit." Fuller himself characterized the book, however, as "in part a least a psychological study of the folly of man." Expertly combining detailed military history and analysis with Clausewitzian insights based on his own theories of warfare, Fuller produced a modern military masterpiece in The Second World War.