In a recent interview satirist Barry Humphries spoke to the Financial Times about his alter ego Dame Edna Everage and his ‘nice’ childhood in Melbourne that he soon fled because it was too much so. He then created Dame Edna to be the opposite of that middle-class Melbourne with its thinly veiled racism, snobbery and one-upmanship.

But he also tells how he once knew a man who had worked for the Nazi foreign minister Von Ribbentrop in the 1930s.

“He died last year. I called his widow to express my sympathy and she said [adopts a German accent]: “It’s funny you should have called, Barry, because Reinhardt and I vere talking about you just before he died.” And I said: “Oh, what did he say?’ And she said: ‘“It’s extraordinary,” he said, “you know that Barry Humphries, ze Fuehrer would have adored him.”’ He laughs delightedly. ‘The Fuehrer would have adored him!’ I thought, well that’s something to put in a little strap along my next book, isn’t it?”

— From London, via The Week and The FT.

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