Martyn Bond (OP 1954-55) has written Hitler’s Cosmopolitan Bastard, the first English biography of Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, a political activist in the 1920s who planned the peaceful integration of the continent.  

He set up the Pan-Europa Union, a forerunner of the current EU. Hitler saw him as a rival, condemned him in Mein Kampf as a ‘cosmopolitan bastard’, burned his books and banned Pan-Europa. Twice the Count and his Jewish wife dramatically escaped the Gestapo, in Vienna in 1938 and in France in 1940.   

From Lisbon the Americans whisked them away to wartime exile in New York. After the war the Count advised Churchill as he was setting up the European Movement, and then both de Gaulle and Adenauer as they worked for Franco-German reconciliation. He died in Austria just as the UK joined the EEC in 1972.  

During Martyn’s career he taught at the New University of Ulster at the height of the Troubles in the early 1970s and was BBC correspondent in Berlin in the early 1980s when the Cold War was warming up. But otherwise he has played safe, working in London and Brussels as a European civil servant.