we know the date must fall within a certain window of biological possibility, which as we age must progressively narrow to its closing point. Estimating the nature and timing of our collective demise, not a lecture room full, but the end of a civilisation of the entire human project is even less certain. It might happen in the next hundred years or not happen in 2000, or happen within perceptible slowness, a whimper not a bang. But in the face of that unknowability, there has often flourished powerful certainty about the approaching end. Throughout recorded history, people have mesmerized themselves with stories which predict the date and manner of our whole scale destruction, often rendered meaningful by ideas of divine punishment and ultimate redemption, the end of life on earth, the end or last days, end-time, the apocalypse. Many of these stories are highly specific accounts of the future and our devoutly believed. Contemporary apocalyptic movements, Christian or Islamic, some violent, some not, all appear to share fantasies of a violent end and they affect our politics profoundly. The apocalyptic mind can be demonising, that is to say there are other groups, other faiths that it despises for worshipping false gods and these believers of course will not be saved from the fires of hell and the apocalyptic mind tends to be totalitarian, which is to say that these are intact, all encompassing ideas founded in longing and supernatural belief immune to evidence or its lack, and well protected against