Even with four degrees behind him Eric remains untouched by either pretension or the wonders of the Internet – so it came as a surprise when I asked, Did you buy the book about Hitler? and he said, I looked it up on the internet. It said the book compares Trump to Hitler.

Hitler wasn’t a ‘National Socialist’ by accident – he loathed capitalism and, no one, not even Donald Trump’s worst enemy, has ever accused Trump of that.

And Hitler: The Ascent – published in 2013 – never mentions Trump.

And that, I’m guessing, is how fake news works. A Trump-basher posts a blurb; the blurb germinates, metastasizes, sails through the ether and, with the click of a mouse, lands in Eric’s computer and turns a book about Hitler into an attack on Trump.