At the Vigeland Museum in Oslo I saw The Monolith, which, like all of Gustav Vigeland’s work, is deliciously megalomaniac. The almost seventeen-metre-high phallic column consists of 121 human bodies clinging to one another. Vigeland himself said that the column was his life and his religion. There is a connection between The Monolith and the tangled bodies on the forest floor in Antichrist – I nicked them from there.

There is another side to Vigeland as well. He has been accused of promoting an idealised image of humanity that has later been associated with notions of ‘Aryan superiority’. Unlike Edvard Munch, he never officially denounced Nazism. On the contrary, he invited the occupying power into his park, and there are accounts suggesting that he tried to establish contact with Adolf Hitler through the writer Knut Hamsun, the author of Hunger. Hamsun had given his Nobel Prize in Literature to Goebbels in the hope that he would pass it on to Hitler, whom Hamsun admired. His fascination with Nazism made him intensely unpopular in his homeland. My ex-wife’s father drove Knut Hamsun’s wife to the subsequent trial.