‘The presentation [of the Passion],’ it said, ‘will start with Judas betraying Jesus to the High Priest on the steps of St Mark’s Church followed by his trial before Pontius Pilot (sic) outside the Guildhall at 10.40.’

Then ‘Jesus will be whipped in the Grand Square Shopping Centre at 10.55 am, stripped outside the Virgin Mega Store in Park Street at 11.25 and crucified outside Marks and Spencer.’

Was this satire? Was it a genuine notice? The problem with satire these days is that reality almost always surpasses it, or at any rate is subsequently taken as the blueprint for policy. Jesus stripped outside the Virgin Mega Store? Crucified outside Marks and Spencer? Perhaps next year we can have Aztec human sacrifice outside W H Smith, or an auto-da-fé at the entrance to Primark. That would certainly bring the shoppers in.

What is interesting in Dr Lustig’s subsequent ensuing chapter is that neither the words ‘ignorance’ nor ‘foolishness,’ let alone ‘stupidity,’ appear. Dr Lustig is committed to the idea that people such as [his patient] Juan’s mother can do no wrong because they are the mere playthings of governments and large corporations. Four legs good, two legs bad. For Dr Lustig, Juan’s mother is not a full human being like you and me; she is a mere vector of forces acting upon her. But if giving a gallon of orange juice a day to a six year-old child does not qualify a person as stupid, then the word has no application.

I am not much good at idolatry. I regard Nelson Mandela as less than a god, though I can see his merits such as dignity, old age and a talent for conciliation. Neither have I been carried away by Oscar Pistorius, said to be the second most admired South African, perhaps because I place athletic prowess rather low on the scale of human accomplishment. In my heart of hearts I even find the adulation accorded him bizarre, tasteless, dishonest and emotionally kitsch: but one is not allowed to say so. 

I nevertheless found the reports of his appearance in court on a charge of having murdered his girlfriend fascinating, more for what they told us about ourselves and our society than for what they told us about him.

A new study on calcium consumption concludes that too much is just as bad as not enough, suggesting, as Dalrymple says in this Pajamas Media piece, that “the benefit of calcium supplementation is not only the medical equivalent of an urban myth, but a dangerous one at that.”

Modern man’s religion is progress: what comes later must be better than what went before…

But aesthetics are not science: aesthetics do not show the same inbuilt tendency to improvement. From the aesthetic point of view what comes after is not necessarily better than what went before, and is often worse, even much worse. Particularly in an age of progress, however, men are reluctant to admit that they cannot do better than their forebears; to admit it is to admit the heresy that beauty’s arrow, unlike that of time, does not fly in one direction only. A return to the pattern or design of the past – dismissed as pastiche, the worst of all architectural crimes, far worse than destroying an immemorial townscape – would indicate a deficiency of imagination, inventiveness and originality, all the qualities that make the artist, at least in the romantic conception of the artist. And architects, in their own conception, are above all artists: artists, moreover, when it is widely believed that the purpose of art is to challenge, to question, to transgress, never to celebrate, to harmonise, to console, to give meaning.

There is actually no reason at all why old designs cannot be reproduced, albeit with mass-produced materials. Indeed, in London recently a housing authority did precisely this; it copied precisely the elegant early Victorian buildings (still of Regency inspiration) of three sides of a residential square in restoring the fourth side. It did not use Victorian methods, but it used Victorian designs, with triumphant result, far, far better than any residential architecture of the recent past.