Shortly before one o?clock on the afternoon of Tuesday 27 September 1938, Mr Hugh Legat of His Majesty?s Diplomatic Service was shown to his table beside one of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Ritz Restaurant in London, ordered a half-bottle of 1921 Dom Perignon he could not afford, folded his copy of The Times to page seventeen, and began to read for the third time the speech that had been delivered the night before in Berlin?s Sportpalast by Adolf Hitler.