In reality, every democracy, however sophisticated or stable it may look, has been attacked or actually destroyed by a would-be Caesar, from Ancient Greece to the present day.

It may not be a perfect way of redressing the balance but there’s no denying that something was amiss).It's not just dishonest scholars who benefit from this intellectual fraud but hostile nations and human rights abusers hoping to distract from their own ongoing villainy. As evidence, he points to the young Americans and Europeans who “travel the world to find the temples of the Far East, while failing to spend any time in the cathedrals on their own doorsteps. He says that 'few people wished to defend the maintenance of confederate statues' after the George Floyd protests erupted, yet many did defend the statues including the President of the USA. He first delves into the case of the Whistler mural in the Tate Modern’s dining room which may never see the light of day due to a campaign to have it dismissed as racist because it depicts a couple of very tiny figures in a somewhat antiquated light (it was painted in 1928).

Murray’s description of the Tate’s decision to close a restaurant due to a Rex Whistler mural that includes an enslaved boy also makes for uncomfortable reading. This generation isn’t brainwashed or immature or unrealistic, it’s merely responding to the problems of the day, at a time when the old narratives have begun to crumble, and access to information is at an all-time high.

Blood and Oil is the explosive untold story of how Mohammed bin Salman and his entourage grabbed power in the Middle East and acquired a network of Western allies - including well-known US bankers, Hollywood figures, and politicians - all eager to help the charming and crafty crown prince. But again, if such subversive people do exist within western society itself, then they have failed completely. I take his point that some of this rhetoric goes too a rather silly and extreme place, but it’s low-hanging fruit. Indeed, he even compares Churchill to a religious figure, a moral figurehead for our age, rather than a two-time Prime Minister who accomplished something pretty big the first time, had an undoubtedly illustrious career but may have committed both good and bad across his many years. Their anti-western influence is spreading across religious, cultural and business institutions—even the National Trust—imbuing them with a crushing sense of guilt.

Ferdinand Mount opens up a fascinating exploration of how and why Caesars seize power and why they fall. This work, as Murray movingly relates, was conceived as a protest against Kristallnacht, by a Jewish-American composer so deeply affected by the plangent music of the African-American tradition that he once wept at a performance in 1960s Baltimore, at which the largely black audience recognised the spirituals and began, spontaneously, to sing them. Murray claims this isn’t true and that colonialism, Indian independence and the slave trade are all big parts of history syllabi in the UK. Their sense of the injustices of Western society, many of which are real enough, will not be diminished by having someone tell them not to be resentful, and if anti-Westernism is the only game in town that provides an outlet for altruistic sentiment, it is likely to gain many adherents. Murray appears regularly in the British broadcast media, commentating on issues from a conservative standpoint, and he is often critical of Islamic fundamentalism.All history, after a point, is propagandistic—Julian Barnes is very compelling on the subject: on the essential feeling that historical narratives are, to an extent, deceitful and have an element of fiction woven into them; and that the objective truth is gone and can never be regained, perhaps even never existed, not in a form humans can articulate at least. Murray’s book is not, of course, apolitical as a whole, and its political aspects account, I think, for some of its shortcomings. The saga of Boris Johnson and Brexit frequently crops up in this author's narrative as a vivid, if Lilliputian instance of the same phenomenon. He’s certain that people are coming to decolonise maths and make it antiracist, although he can only cite some ridiculous quotes about people trying to prove 2+2=5, before telling the reader that such systems are being rolled out across the west (citation needed).