‘What raised him,’ wrote Robert Lowell in his poem ‘Stalin’, ‘was an unusual lust to break the icon,/ joke cruelly, seriously, and be himself’. One of the shocking and exemplary virtues of Richard Overy’s book on the two most horrible regimes of the European 20th century, is that it is, often, terribly funny. I don’t use ‘terribly’, here, as a random intensifier. Both Hitler and Stalin operated at the juncture between high camp and death camp. The joke both cruel and serious plays around these stories.

Brecht’s version of Hitler — the resistible Arturo Ui — is for most of his story a comic figure; as was Chaplin’s. The rhetoric of dictatorship was peculiarly vulnerable to having its absurdity exposed to ridicule and Göring, rather chillingly, used to carry a leather-bound notebook in which he anthologised jokes he heard told against him.

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