Black Cat. Windowless room. Midnight. By Jan Needle
Everybody knows the Henry Ford bon mot. ‘History is bunk,’ the great man said. Or didn’t, probably. Search hard enough (not very hard, at that) and you’ll discover several different versions, all claimed by someone as the one and only truth. ‘History is junk.’ ‘History is bunkum.’ ‘History is the junk.’ ‘History is the bunk.’ Or try Hermann Goering’s chilling giveaway of the Nazi character. ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.’ Ooh, nasty – except that what he probably said – an adaptation of a quote by the poet and playwright Hanns Johst – was ‘When I hear the word Kultur [which has subtle connotations in German anyway] I reach for my Browning.’ Aha! A sophisticated joke, perhaps. Does he mean a semi-automatic pistol, a medium machine gun – or the revered English poet, whose own ambiguity, for me, is best revealed in My Last Duchess? You tell me. When I wrote my first version of my Rudolf Hess book, which HarperCollins publish...