All the nations that ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand. The traces fade with every tide, the echoes grow faint, the images are fractured, the human material is atomized and recycled. But if we know where to look, there is always a remnant, a reminder, an irreducible residue.

Herein lie the roots of another historiographic phenomenon. Having been made the centrepiece of a dubious moral parable about Good and Evil in modern times, German history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has reached unequalled prominence in the academic syllabus, commanding by far the largest number of theses, textbooks, courses and researchers.

If we lived in the middle of a fireworks exhibition, Einstein lectured, everybody would understand my theory of space-time immediately, directly, sensorially. But we do live in the middle of a fireworks display: the velocity is not observed because we are moving with it. Why then do I observe it now?

Indeed, even the profane psychologists have rediscovered what the mystics always knew: Unconscious Will, if prevented from acting, returns in the night to haunt our dreams. And sometimes it returns in the daytime, too, in the form of irrational behaviours which we cannot understand.

‘The history of consciousness is a history of words,’ Joyce said immediately. ‘Shelley was justified in his bloody unbearable arrogance, when he wrote that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Those whose words make new metaphors that sink into the public consciousness, create new ways of knowing ourselves and others.’