He is quick to point out that this obsession is equally prevalent in Germany (“just open any copy of Der Spiegel or Die Zeit”), and earlier this year he criticised the resurgence of “the old brown gang” in Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film of Hitler’s last days, as evidence of the continuing addiction. Burleigh’s own seminal work on the Third Reich shows how an “emphatically this-worldly” political religion caricatured fundamental patterns of religious belief, and creating a congregation of the faithful and “a specific social order”, sanctified by Providence. According to Voegelin, the first “world-immanent” religion was introduced in Ancient Egypt in about 1,376BC under the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV who, adopting the name Akhenaton, declared himself the son of the sun god Aton. Voegelin’s book ends with a depiction of Adolf Hitler as Akhenaton modernised, a “sun-lit ‘Fuhrer’ bursting through the clouds over Greater Germany”.

A number of contemporaries had viewed Hitler as a fanatical preacher, some going so far as to compare him to the Anabaptist sectarians who spread terror in parts of 16th-century Germany. Furthermore, the idea of Nazism as a secularised religion, emerging after the apocalypse of the First World War, which intensified pseudo-religious strains in politics, has a distinguished intellectual lineage.
One of Michael Burleigh’s heroes, and a decisive influence on his writing, is the political scientist Eric Voegelin, who fled his academic post in Vienna on the eve of the Anschluss, and whose book, The Political Religions, makes what is for Burleigh the “crucial distinction”: between “world-transcendent” and “world-immanent” religions. If anything, he says now, he was conscious of “trying to undermine readers’ interest in the subject”. Instead, based on the archival research he’d been pursuing for more than a decade, and on his reading of the massive literature generated by Nazi Germany (over 55,000 titles for the subject of one chapter alone), the book set out to view Nazism as a form of political religion This wasn’t a novel approach. The Third Reich went on to win the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, was translated into 15 languages (“even Estonian”, Burleigh notes), and to date has sold over 250,000 copies. Yet both Burleigh and his publishers were taken unawares by the book’s runaway success.

For a start, Burleigh’s treatment of the Nazi regime refused to cater for what he has described as “the decadent appetite for the lurid, which is regrettably part of contemporary interest in the subject”. He secretly scorns her stupidity and proprieties then gets her daughter, Josie, in the family way when his more serious flirting with her smart educated aunt, Ruth, goes woundingly awry. In the end, he may be trapped here forever, facing embittered mediocrity, scribbling tat for commercial tours.
This play and Peter Gill’s direction are often delightfully funny, sharply observed and tense. Anne Reid is wonderful as the wittering Mrs Elliot, risibly petty yet touchingly generous, and Geoffrey Hutchings is hilariously curmudgeonly as her husband, Percy.

Setting aside the casting’s added frisson – Fiennes stealing a kiss from his brother Ralph’s partner – Francesca Annis’ Ruth has magnetic elegance and palpable buried pain. However, she slightly milks one or two moments and, personally, I found Joseph Fiennes almost unwatchable. He did cope brilliantly with the press-night nightmare of a door handle coming off in his hand, swiftly determining to turn Josie’s seduction into an on-the-hop kitchen-sink affair if the bed was going to play hard to get. The rest of the time, however, he lacks edge and wit and is a mass of exaggerated mannerisms.Granted, George is meant to be a theatrical poseur but Fiennes whole performance – including villainous scowls – looks hammy. Osborne’s games with art and life work far better in The Entertainer and this play oscillates between old-fashioned creakiness and riveting slices of life.Meanwhile Sam West’s regime at the Crucible, post-Michael Grandage, got off to a shaky start with Shakespeare’s Much Ado, staged without much of a clue by West’s new associate, Josie Rourke.