NOTHING precious should be within reach of a vandal. In February 1845, the Portland Vase — a rare Roman cameo glass, dateable to the 1st century AD — was smashed into over 200 pieces by a drunken student.

On May 21, 1972, in St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, Michelangelo’s priceless statue — the Pietà — was damaged by a deranged geologist, Laszlo Toth. It took Toth minutes to vandalise what had taken Michelangelo two years to sculpt. Specialists spent 10 months restoring 100 fragments to the statue, using marble removed from the back of the sculpture. Cruelly, the original tip of Mary’s nose could not be recovered as it had been pocketed by some unfeeling tourist.

It has taken President Donald Trump less than two years to trivialise the Nobel Peace Prize, to lower it from distinction to ridicule.

Alfred Nobel instituted his Peace Prize in 1901 in a belated act of contrition for having invented dynamite and ballistite. His ingenuity converted his Bofors manufactory into an arms producer. That brainchild, however, proved to be the undoing of the Congress party and its leader Rajiv Gandhi. The party lost the November 1989 general elections after the revelation that key Indian politicians and uniformed........

© Dawn