Having much enjoyed Phil Baker’s biography of Austin Osman Spare, I have just started reading his earlier life of Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Is A Gentleman (2009). It is as informative, entertaining, and amusing as the Spare book. Here is Dennis, reminiscing about his visit to Germany in 1913 to learn about the family wine trade. He was much impressed by the officer class…

… a race apart, immune from arrest by the police, they could be tried only by their own courts of honour and, if found guilty of a disgraceful act, they were simply given a pistol with which to shoot themselves. The civilian population had been conditioned to regard them with abject veneration. Ladies, as well as men, when approaching one of them in a street, stepped off the pavement into the gutter to give them ample room to pass, which they accepted as their right and did not even acknowledge by the flicker of an eyelid. Awed, and admiring, I watched them greet one another with a graceful salute, a click of the heels and a sharp bow from the waist. It was years later before I realised that very few of them had any brains at all …