You don’t read a book this big, it moves in with you, you live with it. My son’s first swimming lessons, forever connected to this epic, as with many other memories of past months.

Shirer had a ring-side seat and he commentates the momentous rise and fall of this almost textbook evil regime blow by blow. It brings to light the pantomime evil, horrific evil, evil genius, banal evil, absurd evil, the absolute evil, of the Nazis and the nation that carried it. As well as first hand experience, Shirer studied the archive of Nazi documents, giving the book a fly-on-the-wall feel to Hitler’s out-maneuvering of the hesitant west, his bold reassertion the Rhineland, his egomaniacal self-destruction, and the plots to assassinate him. Shirer paints the absurd castle of propaganda and lunacy which the Nazi party built for themselves to live in, where nobody questioned their leader or their beliefs.

The Second World War, some believe, is overstudied. Yet every time I read about it, I learn so many new things. It is a tale with so many dimensions. Hitler from gutter to power; the fallout of the first war; the rise of Fascism, modern technology to communicate, defend and kill; the dominance of an evil genius; when all seems lost the underdog fights back; the emerging power of the US; the horror of the holocaust. Through it all, the best and worst of humanity, inexplicably.

Hitler lived a paranoid existence. He changed his plans by the hour to remain unpredictable. He was obsessed with security and personal defence. It is a favourite irony of mine that all this energy came to nothing, that in the end he killed himself. Of course he was never sufficiently self-aware to recognise that he was the root of his own destruction from years early. Managing our own psychologies is usually the hardest task.

A flaw of dictatorship is that they require acquiescence & cooperation, and necessarily favour loyalty over competence. That’s what makes them weak. A flaw of evil is that it breads its own enemies.

The problem for history is that this story sounds larger than life, too insane to believe, and therefore difficult to imagine that it could ever happen again. Can we stop it?