At the start of his series, Clark asked: “What is civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms, yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it.” Turning to Notre Dame, he added: “And I’m looking at it now.” Schama, shaken by Isis brutality, is certain: “We can spend a lot of time debating what civilisation is or isn’t,” he says, “but when its opposite shows up, in all its brutality and cruelty and intolerance and lust for destruction, we know what civilisation is, we know it from the shock of its imminent loss, as a mutilation on the body of humanity.”