His handsome and expanded edition of John Carroll’s Humanism (1993) is given added weight by an epilogue about the meaning of September 11. It can now be read alongside his recent The Western Dreaming (2001), which tried to chart a way out of the spiritual atrophy of late modernity in which, as this book argues, the unfolding of humanism from the Renaissance on has left us – with its egoistic individualism, its rationalistic blindness to limits and its rancorous hostility to the sacred.

Carroll is a boldly eccentric thinker; misguided, perhaps, but pointing to real and important things. We have drifted into dangerous waters, and the decline of religious faith and authority has much to do with it. Neither the rudder of moral direction nor the sails of spiritual inspiration are working well or harmoniously. One baulks at Carroll’s assertive generalising, his selectiveness, his wilful misinterpretations. Yet one shouldn’t dwell on the sweeping brushwork of Carroll’s ‘big picture’, a blend of cultural history and polemic, as if Friedrich Nietzsche and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation were oddly coupled. In our age of academic specialisation, anyone who can write with his range and insight should be respected.