ADOLF EICHMANN, AS everyone knows, was the man responsible, literally, for shipping millions of European Jews to their deaths in the extermination camps in Poland during the Second World War. He has become, as David Cesarani reminds us in this perceptive and intelligent new account of Eichmann's life, a familiar image in the grim iconography of genocide.

This image owes a great deal to the dramatic way in which he was finally caught by an Israeli snatch squad in Argentina, taken to Israel and put on trial in 1960 in front of a world which knew much less about the Holocaust than it does now. The Eichmann