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“The Christians had a very clear picture of things. The simplest peasant could take it in and the subtlest schoolman could spend a lifetime interpreting it. It was simple and permanent. But then Science came along and substituted something difficult and provisional. Decade by decade the picture became more complicated and shorter lived – until now neither the learned nor the simple at all know where they stand. And it is thus that Science puts out the lamps of reason; it is thus that Science is a vast softening process, a vast clearing the way for world-wide superstition. Science offers no fixed points of belief. And Science, in the popular mind, is the sphere of the unaccountable and the marvellous.” – Mr Emery Wine, the monstrous villain in The Daffodil Affair, 1942, written by Michael Innes

The monstrous villain of 1942 is the well-paid “scientific expert” of 2021. Mr Emery Wine’s evil plan to take over the world with pseudo-science was defeated in fiction, but has not been defeated in real life.