I’m not a churchgoing person but I do appreciate architecture that excites and delights the eye, and some of these structures turn out to be places of worship. This book features more than 150 Christian chapels, basilicas, abbeys and cathedrals, a good number if which are absolutely stunning. The buildings are modern and old, large and small and situated in the centre of bustling cities and in remote places - there’s even a floating church in Cambodia. Some of the exteriors are famously eye-catching, such as St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, but many of the the interiors make statements of comparable impact.

I’ve visited my share of religious buildings over the years, sometimes the experience has been memorable and at other times significantly less so. One unscheduled viewing occurred when I stopped for lunch at a pub in a small village on the edge of Exmoor, in my home county of Devon, and the landlord suggested I cast my eye over the church next door - it dates back to the twelfth century, he said. And what an amazing place it was, it had been knocked around over the years but the front of the church was original and much of the rest was five or six hundred years old. It also had box pews, something I hadn’t seen before. It’s not in this book, but in case you’re interested it was the church of St Mary in Molland.

This book, with its amazing photographs and brief but interesting overview and history showed just how varied places of worship can be. Obviously you have enormous buildings such as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome but at the other end of the scale the church featured in a Kenyan township is literally a tin hut. The weirdest is high heeled shoe, fifty six feet high, made almost entirely of glass in Taiwan and the one I was most awed by is an unbelievable space carved into a mountain in Cairo.

At this point, nearing the end of the first quarter of 2020, it doesn’t look like I’ll be visiting any of the featured sites in the near future. But let’s hope things look and feel a little different at some not too distant point, there are a few here I’d definitely like to get to.