The pre-determined schedule of events at the Olympic Games of 1936 provides this fascinating book with its narrative thread. At the opening ceremony, Hitler appeared boxed in by gaitered, top-hatted Henri de Baillet-Latour, Belgian president of the International Olympic Committee, on his right, and part-Jewish Theodor Lewald, president of the German Organising Committee, on his left. The Nazis used but despised these men. According to Goebbels, the Olympians looked like “the directors of a flea circus”.