AS THE SEASON of entertaining – of being a guest or a host, and tipsy either way – reaches its yearly crescendo, one thinks many thoughts. Is the rib roast ready for the morrow? Did one really miss both A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas? Will the president be Christmas-ing at the White House, or Camp David, or with the tribal elders in Kennebunkport, or at the hallowed ranch in Crawford, Tex. – the place, we are assured over and over by our fabulous media, that will never be seen by the likes of such blackguards as Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder? I find it unnecessary, somehow, to weep for them; on the other hand, poor Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin! They were favored with invitations and had to go, there to don cowboy boots and be driven around in a dusty pickup truck. Shitkicker One, could that be the truck's official designation?

Hospitality, even when conducted at less exalted levels, is unsentimental business, as Jesse Browner sees it in The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down: An Informal History of Hospitality (Bloomsbury, $23.95). It is essentially a highly stylized power relation. Browner doesn't deal with Bushtopia, or whatever the Crawford ranch is called, but he does have some eerie observations to make about the Berghof, Adolf Hitler's mountain retreat in the Alps above the Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden. The place was, according to Browner, the Führer's "favored venue for personal and official hospitality, invitations to which were coveted and eagerly sought by the Nazi elite, members of the international diplomatic corps, and" – yikes – "journalists."

Not surprisingly, Browner adds, "very few aspirants ever made it through the gates of the Berghof complex." Security issues, wouldn't you know it, not to mention Hitler's finickiness about people and his keen sense of human power relations. "Still, there was no mistaking the fact that, once in, you were a private guest in Hitler's home, and Hitler prided himself ... on being a gracious and attentive host, offering his guests what he believed they wanted while controlling every aspect of their stay under his roof.... An invitation to the Berghof was the ultimate billet-doux in the Third Reich."

Hitler was, of course, not merely a "bloodthirsty vegetarian" but a military misadventurer of the first order, and the wheels flew off his thousand-year reich well ahead of schedule. By the dawn of 1945 the food had gone from blah to downright bad – "spaghetti with ketchup, mushrooms and curds," Browner writes, while Sunday dinner was "leftovers served from a single pot" – and "guests stopped accepting invitations to the Berghof and [Hitler] took to eating alone...." Thus ever to megalomaniacs?