"There's a fever and a feeling everything had to come to an end.

"Duchamp said: 'We need the great enema in Europe. And if it's gonna be war, then if we need war, we need war. But we need a great enema.' But they actually sing it in social terms. So the revolution that they're envisaging is, in fact, a social revolution.

"There is a famous text in Zarathustra where Nietzsche produces the idea that the cities are the melting pot of modern humanity, and they literally have to almost explode for this revolution to happen. It's part of Nietzsche's program for man to overcome himself, to break down all those old fashioned stultifying codes. So it's a social revolution.

"It's very rarely mentioned that a lot of these ideas stemmed from the plethora of literature that surged over Germany after Haley's comet was first sighted in 1910 – and there was massive literature about comets. We know that a lot of people were very excited about this. The idea that it was going to land in middle Europe was much spoken about."