Historical parallels?

The Decline of the West RADIO Radio 4 Scheduled for Monday 16 July

To read the commentariat, with its talk of Putin, Trump and an economically dominant China, it’s easy to believe that a liberal world order is breaking down. Yet perhaps we’ve been here before, as when German historian and publisher Oswald Spengler wrote The Decline of the West, the first volume of which was published when the First World War was in its final months.

A century on, BBC media editor Amol Rajan considers what Spengler, who foresaw a Rome-like fall of the western world, may have to teach us today.

Polish children, from refugee camps in Hamburg, arrive in London in 1956