Oh, the things a hack novelist will do to move copies! Macmillan has just published an alternate history novel by C.J. Sansom, the British crime writer famed for his Matthew Shardlake cycle, in which Britain makes peace with the Nazis after Dunkirk and the Right Hon. Enoch Powell becomes Secretary of State for India in a German-allied government.

Huh? Enoch Powell, who wrote to his parents after Chamberlain visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden that:

I do here in the most solemn and bitter manner curse the Prime Minister of England [Great Britain] for having cumulated all his other betrayals of the national interest and honour, by his last terrible exhibition of dishonour, weakness and gullibility. The depths of infamy to which our accurst “love of peace” can lower us are unfathomable. . .

—who left his professorship in classics at Sydney University in order to volunteer immediately after war was declared in 1939, who enlisted as a private in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and ended the war as a brigadier (one of only two men to ascend the ranks so rapidly), who more than once said that he wished he had died in combat?

According to the Daily Mail, Powell’s aged widow Pamela is “furious” with Sansom. Quite rightfully so, one should think.