Proponents of Voluntary Assisted Dying may think they are acting in good faith, but it seems they are unaware of the unspoken and unconscious cultural factors that now determine how we conceive of death. After a century of industrialised slaughter, an individual's life counts for little against the cost-benefit calculations of an increasingly intrusive administrative State

The Left's reaction when anyone notes Marxism's shift from class warfare to promoting identity politics is a near-hysterical explosion of slurs and denials, from accusing critics of antisemitism to homophobia and even child abuse. When your goal is bringing down a society the guiding tenet is 'by any means necessary'

The 'Name of the Rose' dissolves into nothing in the final act, a parable of nihilism that pretends to disclose the true nature of the human condition but actually betrays the ultimate vacuity of our contemporary intellectual world. The Cadfael novels, no less accomplished in their mastery of society and circumstance, make a marked contrast for their good sense in keeping chaos at bay

The factors that would lead to America's decline can be found in Gibbon’s analysis of Rome's fall, the most prominent being the passivity not only of its mainstream churches but also of its leading intellectual and cultural institutions in the face of a massive co-ordinated attack on the nation’s entire civilisational edifice

There is a degree of inevitability about the association of Rome with America, with the implication that the known fate of one might inform the likely fate of the other. Indeed, so close are the two narratives entwined in American culture that this has become a political factor in and of itself

Modernism proclaimed itself ‘anti-civilisation’, characterised by a fanatical rejection of the core values, traditions and conventions that had sustained Western Civilisation for over a millennium. Depressing as that may be, take heart! As Kenneth Clark noted, civilisation has plumbed the abysmal depths before, pulled itself together and recovered

Nearly half a millennium separates Michelangelo’s Pieta from Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. Exquisitely carved from marble, Michelangelo’s masterpiece depicts Christ, recently crucified, lying dead in his mother’s lap. Serrano’s puerile provocation demonstrates, just as Sir Kenneth Clark foresaw, how very far and deep Western values and civilisation have slipped

The thirteenth installment of Mervyn Bendle's guide to Sir Kenneth Clark's 'Civilisation' brings us almost to the present day. Have the material achievements of the modern world been matched by comparable advances in culture and society? 'One may be optimistic,' says Clarke, 'but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us'

In the twelth installment of Mervyn Bendle's guide to Sir Kenneth Clark's 'Civilisation', we see faith in mankind's ability to find and embrace freedom, in both its political and personal incarnations, descend into tyranny, genocide and tears. This, as Clark describes it, brought the bitter revelation that hope bestrode the artistic imagination on feet of clay