If we want to understand how power and architecture work together, we might begin by asking how Culture One and Two fit into today’s world. Is it right, for instance, to think of the “West” as living in a version of Culture One, possessed of dynamism and sophistication and freed of utopian modernist narratives? As for the “East”, Paperny himself has expressed uncertainty about whether these categories can be neatly applied to Russia any longer, with its plethora of new, post-socialist monuments. One thing is certain: to begin to understand how power and architecture work in a globalised economy, we don’t need to turn to Moscow, Astana, or even Beijing. There is much to consider right here in London.

Just a few weeks before he and his Conservative party were ousted from power in London, the city’s Mayor Boris Johnson stood in front of a gleaming classical ruin on Trafalgar Square, shouting something about “defiance” and “the barbarians”. The ruin was the central section of a decorative arch in Palmyra, a Roman-era oasis city in the Syrian desert; the original section of the arch had been blown to pieces by ISIS during its ten-month long occupation of the site.