In the dying days of the cataclysmic world war that he had provoked and lost, Adolf Hitler delivered late-night Table Talk monologues to his fellow psychopaths, conveying thoughts that now seem quite remarkable in their political perspicacity.

One concerned what would later be called the Cold War.

“With the defeat of the Reich,” he predicted, “there will remain in the world only two great powers capable of confronting each other – the United States and Soviet Russia.

“The laws of both history and geography will compel these two powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the field of economics and ideology.”

This astute observation is recorded in the earliest and, in some ways, still the best biography of the Fuhrer, Hitler, A Study in Tyranny, which appeared in 1952.

Its author, the Oxford-based historian Alan Bullock, comments: “Those who dismiss Hitler’s political gifts as negligible may well be asked how many in the spring of 1945, with the war not yet over, saw the future so clearly.”

I reread Bullock’s magisterial life – so full of the warm humanity that characterised the man – on a holiday last month in Greece.

It is as well, perhaps, to be reminded of Nazi atrocities in a country that suffered so sharply from them. There were victims among the islanders of Naxos, my holiday home.

I also used my leisure hours there for a belated study of Artemis Cooper’s biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor, which was published in 2012.

This noted Grecophile, of course, played a key role in galvanising the country’s resistance to the German invaders, under the command of CM ‘Monty’ Woodhouse, later to become Oxford’s Conservative member of parliament.

I wondered how these two men might have reacted to the two fingers effectively delivered to our Greek brothers and sisters of the European community in the shameful referendum vote on EU membership.

Friends on Naxos were amazed by what occurred; fearful, too, concerning the break-up of an institution which, for all its faults and despite the financial traumas of recent years, has brought rich benefits to their country.

“What did the EU ever do for us?” a Naxiate might ask in imitation of the Palestinian freedom fighters’ question concerning the Romans in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

And the answer, in some ways, would not be so very different. Perhaps not aqueducts, but certainly reservoirs – two of them, both standing worryingly empty after a winter with unusually low rainfall, indeed scarcely any rain at all.

It’s as well, perhaps, though not for the economy, that on current predictions there will be far fewer tourists this year to compete for meagre supplies. Bookings are down at least 30 per cent, partly owing to misplaced fears about a country overrun with refugees.

No doubt there will be still fewer tourists – here as everywhere in Europe – because of the falling value of the pound that was among the first results of the national folly over Brexit.

“Project fear,” the Daily Mail and its like dubbed the very reasonable warnings of David Cameron and others opposed to the coming lunacy. I hope their readers – noting the dwindling value of their holiday cash – will be ruing the day they fell for Boris Johnson’s lies so disgracefully pedalled in the press.

Perhaps, too, they will be noting the effect on house prices – a matter of central concern to readers of the Mail, at least in the opinion of its editor Paul Dacre who seizes every opportunity (except this one) to comment on them.

But, back to Greece and the benefits of EU membership – among which can definitely be numbered roads. Like the Romans in Palestine, the EU has gifted Naxos plenty of them.

When I first visited the island in 1987, the vast majority of its routes were no more than sand or gravel tracks. They were traversed not by the gleaming cars and swanky pick-up trucks you see today but almost exclusively by donkeys and tractors. You could see whole families, done up in their Sunday best, setting off for church on a truck fixed up behind a rotavator.

Indeed, there has been a mighty EU-led change here.

As folk in Britain cast their fatal vote (I’d done a postal), I was with villagers at a cheery event marking the end of the Whitsun holiday.

This was part of a custom, peculiar to the islands of the Cyclades and Crete, known as ‘klidonas’, which is tied up with the festival of St John on June 23.

Youngsters danced in well-practised formation as a donkey – yes, there still are some – made its way to the principal public square laden with dried flowers which, since late May, had bedecked the village houses.

These were burned as a climax to the event, with local lads leaping across the flames, each determined to outdo the others in the boldness of their approach.

It was an uplifting occasion into which Rosemarie and I were absorbed with an eager warmth, placed in a prominent position to watch the dancing and plied with drinks and delicious local cheese.

Then it was time to head home, for a nightcap whisky and the final chapter or two of Bullock’s life of Hitler.

This brought further Table Talk, with more telling predictions for the future.

Here is one: “Instead of maintaining European rivalries, Britain ought to do her utmost to bring about a unification of Europe.

“Allied to a united Europe, she would then still retain the chance of being able to play the part of arbiter in world affairs.”

What chance now?