‘The same treatment was dished out to victims of jihad wherever the Muslim armies went. As the conquest swept into India they spent centuries levelling Hindu temples and massacring thousands of Brahmin priests. They would break the idols, mix the fragments with the flesh of slaughtered sacred cows and hang them in nosebags around the necks of the Brahmins they kept alive as slaves. Then if anyone dared rebuild the temples, whole towns were put to the sword of Islam, women and children were taken as slaves and the chief culprits were crushed under the feet of elephants. In Keysin, Anatolia, in the early ninth century, they sacked and destroyed an ancient church said to have been constructed by the apostles of Christ themselves.

‘And on, and on. The ruin of the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem in 937. The razing to the ground of the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela and its famous shrine of St James, sixty years later. The desecration of the Hagia Sophia, the grandest church in Christendom when, in May 1453, after seven hundred years of trying, the jihadists finally got their chance to sack Constantinople, slaughter or enslave its inhabitants and overthrow what was left of the Byzantine Empire, as their prophet had vowed to do centuries earlier. Nothing outside Islam was safe as they pursued their quest to purify the whole world from idolatry.’

It was a grim historical account and it left her almost breathless. She shook her head as though she could hardly believe it herself.

‘This is all in your article?’

‘Are you kidding? I could write a book.’

Ben smiled. ‘Perhaps you should.’

‘Except nobody would publish it. They’d probably say it was “Islamophobic”.’ She made quote marks in the air with her fingers. ‘No matter that these are documented historical facts.’

Ben said, ‘I was in Iraq, during the war. I saw a lot of the ravages there.’