I failed my History GCSE mainly because I had useless teachers who taught the subject as just one arid fact after another. I knew about the devious route by which Hitler came to power but nothing about the cultural and psychological circumstances that prevailed in the run up to war. Harris’s great achievement is that he brings history fully alive in all its human complexity and drama. He is a first rate scholar who meticulously researches the world which he wants to write about then transforms that labour into a character-led story that is so riveting and atmospheric you do not want it to end – even though you already know what the ending must be!

The other thing is that the text is so easy to read. There is no superfluity of language, no pompous self-indulgent moralising. Everything is crisp, minimal and designed to carry the story forward – the story being about two civil servants who met as students at Oxford and now have jobs mainly as translators in their respective governments. We experience all the main players in the political drama through their eyes, therefore. We move with them seamlessly from London to Berlin and back again. We feel their impotence to impose intelligence on the critical situation, their frustration, their resentment, their fears, above all their sense of guilt and their sense of the futility of honest human endeavour.

There are too many dramatic moments and clever twists of plot to document here. I loved the moment when personally confronted with Hitler and the apologetics of Nazism Legat suddenly realises what fascism is intrinsically all about – the triumph of unreason. I also loved the way Legat’s infidelity with Hartmann’s girlfriend is insinuated and described as the one and only act of reckless daring this stuffed shirt conservative Englishman ever allowed himself. It comments profoundly on the ambiguous nature of the relationship between the two old friends. And finally there is that crucial moment when Hartmann finds himself alone with Hitler, a pistol in his pocket, an opportunity to change the course of history which he fails to take, held back by what? Not squeamishness so much as innate moral decency. Hartmann’s flaw is that he understands the brutalism of the Nazis all too well but cannot translate his moral repugnance into action because unlike them he is simply too genteel and refined.

I doubt that popular historical fiction gets much better than the stuff Harris consistently offers up. He marries absurdity and tragedy, moral seriousness and foolish egotism in a non partisan way that neither privileges the Brits nor the Germans nor French nor Italians. He shows us in minute performance detail a fatuous patriarchal world in which women either type or flirt or sit passively by while their male masters strut and fret their incompetent bombastic way around the global stage. A brilliant elegiac commentary not just on world war two, perhaps, but on all conflicts and all times.

5 stars *****