A short while ago, I was the recipient of a “lifetime achievement award” from the healthcare group that I worked in, and it was meant to recognise a corpus of successful things that I had done in my professional career.

The award also came with a weighty crystal trophy. Hefting it in my hand, I thought – somewhat grandiosely perhaps – of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, of the once-great, ancient Egyptian pharaoh whose monumental statue had been reduced by the passage of time to a crumbling heap, with its visible inscription ironically proclaiming his greatness as the “King of Kings”.