The right-wing is becoming more and more radicalised and we’re entering a very dark time politically, our Writer at Large Neil Mackay warns

This summer, I made a pilgrimage to Madrid to see the Goya collection at the Prado Museum. There’s no artist from the past who speaks more to the present. Extremism, the atrocities of war, humanity’s boundless capacity for sadism, our thirst for self-destruction, our wallowing in rank stupidity. It’s all there in the work of Francisco Goya.

Goya - like us - lived in an age when sense surrendered to madness. Born during the Enlightenment, in old age he witnessed Europe reduced to rubble as Napoleon and his rivals played chess with the lives of millions. One of Goya’s greatest works is The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters: an engraving of a man asleep at his desk as horrible creatures swarm around - demonic bats, owls and cats. The metaphor is simple: when we turn off rationality - when we reject thought - horror follows.

The Sleep of Reason was created just before the Napoleonic Wars, but if Goya were alive today, he’d be working on the same piece once again, I reckon.

Read more from Neil

There’s a madness in the air today; a deliberate irrationality, a wilful rejection of decency. It flows from our leaders - if that word can even be used to describe the class of people at the top of politics anymore - and it has trickled its poison all the way down into our lives. A sickness is at large: barely contained and feverish spite. Words are being said which I never thought I’d hear from public figures in my lifetime. While there’s extremism on........

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