Some of Farmer's infelicities can be excused on the grounds that he's gone for a deliberately pulpy style. He's more concerned with cranking out a story at a furious pace than dwelling on technical and psychological details. His portrayal of Hermann Göring, for instance, is cartoonish at best, but that doesn't matter because we all know what Göring was like and anyway, look – he's naked and tripping his nuts off and murdering everyone!

More unforgivable is the bad prose, particularly the mounds of information dumping: "Burton looked closely at the man. Could he actually be the legendary king of ancient Rome? Of Rome when it was a small village threatened by other Italic tribes, the Sabines, the Aequi and Volsci? Who in turn were being pressed by the Umbrians, themselves pushed by the powerful Etruscans?"