One of the minor characters in Evelyn Waugh’s World War II trilogy,
Sword of Honor
, is the commander of a super-secret military intelligence unit, Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole: a conspiracy theorist constantly connecting dots that no rational person would imagine connecting or even think connectable. The colonel was also possessed by a messiah complex: “Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end: and there would be no more war.” To Grace-Groundling-Marchpole, the Allies and the Nazis were in fact on the same side; and as soon as that was revealed, all would be well with the world.