Coincidentally, I have recently finished The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood; the coincidence being that I have also recently returned from the USA, where I endeavoured to bear witness, as best a tourist can, to the rise of Donald Trump. I made no connection between the two when I first picked up the book – it is a classic and, as a writer, it behoves me to muddle through the classics. I even have a spreadsheet to assist me and The Berlin Stories was merely another column to be ticked. However, those of you familiar with it – perhaps with its fame as the crucible in which Sally Bowles and the musical Cabaret were forged – might understand how, for a stranger in a land of deepening political crises, this book should prove to be more than a tick on a spreadsheet.

I feel compelled to say I find the everyday comparisons of Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler to be, inter alia, hysterical. Surely the world has changed too much since 1933 for the next ‘Hitler’ to be recognisable as such before the bodies start to accumulate. Moreover, Hitler was a fierce ideologue, while Trump is the opposite of that, despite their shared rhetoric of national rejuvenation. The similarities are striking when seen through the lens of Isherwood’s work, but they may be just as coincidental as it was that I took up a book set amongst the hoy polloi during the rise of Nazism in Berlin, while myself attending rallies and registering first-hand the shamelessness of the red-capped, boofheaded nasties Trump’s candidacy unleashed.