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.