AT THE end of his 1981 book The Portage to San Cristobal of AH, George Steiner asks his readers to imagine the unimaginable. The year is 1980, and Mossad agents have just taken an implausible prisoner in the Latin American jungle: Adolf Hitler.

In the novel’s alternative timeline, the former dictator flees Germany after 1945 and escapes into transatlantic hiding. Held captive by a squad of Nazi hunters, the now-91-year-old delivers an exculpatory speech reflecting on humanity’s future.

“In a world that has tortured political prisoners and has stripped the earth of plant and animal,” Hitler exclaims, “the ‘one out of hell’ was thought to have been extinct.” One day, however, his kind would return, and their “crimes were to be matched and surpassed by those of others”.