CRISES breed conspiracies. The burnt phone masts across Britain, torched on the unfounded belief that coronavirus is caused by the roll-out of 5G, testify to this.

Since 2008, the long recession has seen faith in official narratives falter and proven a fertile incubator for arcane theories like belief the earth is flat. In I Want to Believe, AM Gittlitz has recovered an unlikely left-wing hero for these febrile times in the Argentine Trotskyist J Posadas (1912-1981), a figure now largely remembered for his belief that we need to take flying saucers seriously as emissaries from advanced communist civilisations.

Gittlitz originally wanted to write a pulpy conspiracy novel in the vein of Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminati trilogy but he soon realised that the story of Posadas was strange enough without having to embellish it with the contrivances of fiction.