This is the second foray by the prolific English biographer, novelist, and feuilletonist A. N. Wilson into the ever alluring subject of Adolf Hitler. The first was his 2007 novel Winnie and Wolf, which explored the role of the (Richard) Wagner family and Nazi Germany. It was quite well received, but it left the troubling question whether such a partial portrayal of Hitler (“Wolf,” Hitler's nickname) is defensible as it placed him in the Wagnerian world of fiction without reference to the real Hitler, perpetrator of the murder of millions in total war and genocide.

The volume at hand is dedicated to an all-out effort of understanding that essential historical Hitler. As the author puts it to his readers plainly and dramatically in the very first paragraph, “Hitler has retained his place as the Demon King of history, the ultimate horror tyrant. For this reason alone we feel compelled to revisit the story of his life.” Readers should not expect a work by a professional historian typically interested in adding or correcting information and arguing in the context of a larger historical debate. Wilson has certainly done his homework. He has consulted the most important Hitler biographies and other key sources and is generally up-to-date. But the physical layout of the handy, relatively small book with generous spacing and font size already invites readers to reflect on this ultimately monstrous man, who actually embodied, as Wilson argues cogently, very common beliefs and biases of his time.

The first ten chapters follow the usual chronology, but with expansive stories and details to illustrate the author's key arguments. The foundation chapter on Hitler's background before entering politics effectively establishes one well-known part of Hitler's personality as a key for his whole later development: that he was an utterly lazy liar—notwithstanding some real musical and artistic talents, which were simply overwhelmed by that monumental indolence. Interestingly Wilson contrasts this to Hitler's much maligned father. Wilson even cites the more recent evidence that undermines Hitler's much cited bravery in World War I, for which he was awarded an Iron Cross First Class. Having thus pronounced the lazy young man emerging from the war totally lacking in any qualifications, Wilson is bound to conclude in the postwar chapter that Hitler's capacity to speak in public was the “chief and greatest of his gifts” (p. 24) and thus the real key to his rapid ascent to the position of “Our Leader,” which Wilson rightly translates into English to get across the real meaning of Führer.

The rest of the story unfolds in the next nine chapters, with a separate chapter on the Holocaust and the last weeks in the bunker. As Hitler was able to attract growing numbers first of devoted followers and ultimately most of the German population, Wilson fairly and sensitively considers the effects of economic, political, and social crises as well as cultural traditions—without sparing stooges or collaborators. Among the latter, he naturally focuses on the various sympathizers or appeasers particularly among British women of high society. But surprisingly it is not only the appeasers who come in for criticism, but particularly Winston Churchill is repeatedly maligned as a bungling bully, whereas the German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel receives the highest accolades of any of the World War II protagonists. Given the author's 2007 novel, it comes as no surprise that the Wagner circle with its English connections plays a special role in these accounts.

This backdrop of the Wagner connection also lends this biography a greater sense of the dramatic. Starting with the first chapter title, “In that Hour it Began,” that cites Hitler's claim to his friend and admirer, Winniefred Wagner (Richard Wagner's daughter-in-law), that he felt his historical mission for the first time after witnessing a performance of Wagner's opera Rienzi, Wilson effectively contrasts and frames this with a description of Goebbels's reading of Thomas Carlyle's Life of Frederick the Great in the bunker—suggesting that to Hitler it was all a Wagnerian opera. But Wilson also constructs a dramatic contrast on a moral level between the “Demonic King” Hitler and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian of the Lutheran Confessing Church, who died openly resisting the Nazis, and whose Ethics Wilson regards as the direct antithesis to Hitler.

Wilson recounts his story in a lively, elegant, yet conversational style. Always the literary scholar and feulletonist, he delights the reader with many asides. These are usually interesting and enlightening, but all too often they are annoyingly out of context and seem more a testimony to the author's erudition than informative. How can the rumor that the Kaiser asked for English tea as his first act in exile possibly be relevant in this biography? More annoying are flippant, unsubstantiated judgments of people, even if they are guilty Nazis. So he declares Speer “cynical” without giving source or reason (p. 100) and asserts that “Hitler, in common with many dog lovers, was incapable of showing the same affection for any human being” (p. 174). Worse, he condemns people by their appearance, for instance Goebbels, “who physically resembled Nosferatu the vampire of the film legend” (p. 53), or the (certainly disgusting antisemite) “Julius Streicher, whose shaven head was an ugly pink sea urchin” (p. 38), and “the sinister bespeckled Heinrich Himmler” (p. 141). Despicable as they were, this is unacceptable. Finally, for scholars a more serious shortcoming of this biographical essay is that the most frequently cited of the few primary sources (aside from Mein Kampf), Table Talk, has been proven to be wholly unreliable as a source almost a decade ago. Cf. Richard C. Carrier, “Hitler's Table Talk: Troubling Finds,” German Studies Review 26, no. 3 (October 2003): 561–576.

The last chapter, titled “Final Verdict,” is a mixed bag. It starts admirably with Hitler as “cloven hoof of the Enlightenment” down to Carlyle and Napoleon. But then it descends to a simplistic misuse of Hegelian dialectic, murky arguments that Hitler has defined politically correct by his negative example, and imagining another Antichrist/Hitler for our time.