Everyone laughed at Hitler in the 1920s. A century on, are we making the same mistake? | Adrian Chiles

Just because we find a political leader ludicrous, that doesn't mean they're not dangerous

There's something I heard that I can't get out of my mind. It's one line in a very long book full of other very good lines. This was the audiobook of Ian Kershaw's seminal biography of Adolf Hitler. It's absorbing, exhaustive, fascinating and alarming in equal measure. But there is this one line that won't leave me alone. I was driving on a bleak day on a country road when I heard it for the first time. I instantly rewound to hear it again, and then again. And then when I got to where I was going I bought the book itself so I could see it as well as hear it. The line torments me still. And since a problem shared is a problem halved - or whatever the expression is - I ask you to bear the burden with me.

It comes in a chapter called The Beerhall Agitator, about the absurd-looking little rabble-rouser's activities during the early 1920s. As a kid I always wondered how they could all have been taken in by such an apparently ludicrous man. The awful truth, of course, was that enough people thought him ludicrous for this ludicrous man to be calamitously underestimated.