Having considered the subject for the best part of a hundred years, Jacques Barzun — philosopher, cultural historian, educator extraordinaire and all-round public intellectual — appeared convinced: there was nothing to believe in but belief itself. Decline and fall; rebirth and resurgence; efflorescence and rot: such were the preoccupations of a thinker who in his earliest years mixed with Apollinaire, Duchamp, Pound and Cocteau and lived long enough to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush.
His most enduring work, and greatest monument, From Dawn to Decadence, published at the turn of the millennium, when he was 92, is a paean to pessimism that simultaneously dissects the bloated body of western civilisation and marvels at its endless capacity for resurrection.