His Ninth, written in defiance of the political commissars at the end of the Second World War, is shot through with ambiguity.
The book had been preserved by Paddy's prewar lover Balasha Cantacuzène, and was included in the small suitcase she was allowed to pack when thrown out of her estates by communist commissars at the end of the second world war.
"A Soviet commissar laughed at them and told them never to show up again if they didn't want bad things to happen to them," Mrs. Waldman recalled her mother saying, years later.
Any British notion that the Communists were poised for revolution fell within the context of the so-called Percentages Agreement, forged between Churchill and Soviet Commissar Josef Stalin at the code-named "Tolstoy Conference" in Moscow on 9 October 1944.
He accepted the offer of SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein to appoint a Waffen-SS officer as his adjutant at Army Group North in 1944, after the Heerespersonalamt had refused him an adjutant, and filled the Nationalsozialistischer Führungsoffizier (NSFO, essentially a Nazi political commissar) post at Army Group B that had been vacant before his arrival.
The minute he's allowed to break out of either regal mode or visiting Soviet commissar mode – applauding staff at the Mini plant in Oxford for their production figures – he can be surprisingly effective.
Lia Commissar, a project manager at the Wellcome Trust, says there are several reasons why neuromyths gain traction: "They seem to persist because they are easy to understand, fit everyday observation, are heavily promoted or are easy to implement.
André Marty, the chief commissar of the International Brigades based at Albacete, was also an executor of the Great Purge in Spain.
Horrifyingly powerful, the Commissar Vanishes exhibition travelled in Europe; at the launch of a follow-up project at the Gulag museum in Moscow in 2013, King told his audience that Trotskyist groups had willingly helped him, but with "the hilarious proviso" that he shouldn't mention that he had talked to one group, because another would then refuse to see him.
King's book was also the basis of an audiovisual collaboration with Michael Nyman, who "de-faced" an earlier work, The Fall of Icarus, to create a soundtrack to The Commissar Vanishes; it was first performed at the Barbican in London in 1999.
