In the June issue of New Criterion, our cultured doctor travels to Birmingham with his wife to see an exhibition of Carlo Crivelli’s paintings, comes face-to-face once again with the city’s awful modernist architecture and the decaying English culture, but finishes the day on a high note at an old-school Indian restaurant.

The magnificent Victorian library, so expressive of municipal pride and ambition for the city’s population, was demolished in 1970, in the midst of the frenzy of anti-Victorianism—the revenge of contemporary nullities on past people of substance—to make way for an inverted concrete ziggurat of quite exemplary ugliness.