The curious thing is that though Marx purported to have an infallible scientific key to history, almost all his prophesies have failed to happen. On the other hand, Kierkegaard’s forecasts, which were based purely on his imaginative intuition, have been fulfilled to a remarkable degree. Take, for instance, his profound sense that if we lost the solitude or separateness that an awareness of the presence of God alone can give, we would soon find ourselves irretrievably part of a collectivity with only mass communications to shape our hopes, formulate our values and arrange our thinking.

One of the oddest prophets ever was Søren Kierkegaard – a melancholic Dane, a kind of clipperty-clop, ribald Hamlet.