Dear Paul, What bliss it was in that dawn to be alive! As the statues fall, or are besieged, a new era is presaged in which the only statues left will be those of whom “we” approve. That seems to me at the heart of the difficulty with current affairs: who is the “we” who confer or withhold approval? Having written a book highly critical of Churchill, indeed the first one which criticised his war leadership, I am hardly a keeper of the sacred flame, but when I see his statue under siege, the protesters remind me of Macaulay’s comment: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” Whatever the rights and wrongs of a career spanning eight decades, to deface a monument to a man who helped defeat fascism in the name of “anti-fascism” seems close to entering Orwellian doublespeak territory. Statues are erected after due processes of consultation, and in a civilised, democratic society, the same method can be used to remove them. Such processes were not available to those who tore down the statues of dictators, so those are not good precedents to call on for our own iconoclasts. And for me, as a Catholic, that is where a deeper problem lies. We have been here before. So much of the beauty of the medieval church was destroyed in the name of “reform” at the time of the Reformation, and as we contemplate the “bare ruined choirs” I am reminded of the lament for Walsingham: “ Level, level, with the ground/ The towers do lie,/  Which, with their golden glittering tops,/ Pierced once to the sky.” Best, John