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Curl, a veteran architectural historian with a string of big books to his name, certainly tells us what he thinks, and doesn’t spare the presses either. This massive cri de coeur must run to more than 250,000 words, including nearly 200 pages of footnotes, glossary, bibliography and index.

Argued with a pathological attention to detail, and in a style that might have struck even TS Eliot as being a little over-stuffed with classical allusions, it is intended primarily to shock and awe the architectural establishment itself. That’s a pity. At a quarter of the length, and shorn of its more obscure digressions, Curl’s blistering broadside would be a fabulous read for the non-specialist. It’s still entertainingly apoplectic, if you can stick with it. Curl is 81, and his book reads like an outpouring of pent-up anger, contempt, revulsion and despair accumulated over decades.

He traces what he calls (with a biblical capital C) “the Catastrophe” of 20th and 21st-century architecture back to its roots in the Bauhaus group of architects, gathered together by the devious Walter Gropius in Germany just after the First World War. They were a dodgy bunch, exhibiting a cult-like adherence to dubious ideas — and not just about architecture.

Their students were put on a strict vegetarian diet featuring huge doses of garlic, interspersed with fasting and regular enemas, as well as rituals such as “purification of the body” which involved “pricking the skin and anointing it with oils”. Half-starved, with festering sores and terrible breath, they were then indoctrinated with the radical ideals that would go on to dominate (or, as Curl would argue, destroy) the built environment of countless cities over the following century.

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