For those of us who exist long enough it is all too easy to live on somehow through decades of fashionable thinking which then seem, in retrospect, hard to believe have ever occurred. Did people once really think or speak like that?

As the years go by will we willingly credit, for example, that very large numbers of people apparently believed passionately at one time in global warming (on somewhat limited evidence) and not only founded political parties based on such credence but even proposed doing disagreeable things to so-called ‘deniers’?

That last bit wasn’t even particularly far in the past.