She makes imaginative and enlivening links between myth, fiction and political psychology. Her study is a timely look at our craving for divine violence, from the fire next time of biblical prophecy to Travis Bickle’s vision in Taxi Driver: “One day a rain will come and wash all this shit away.”
The most focused parts are, perhaps inevitably, seen through the longest lens. Benjamin explores the Judaeo-Christian origins of Apocalypse: a myth born of exodus, exile and enslavement. It mutates through medieval millennialists and Protestant sects to the Levellers and Fifth Monarchists of the English civil war. Benjamin has a sharp but sympathetic eye for bizarre religious sensibilities, and vividly conjures the tragi-comic ghosts of Joanna Southcott and the founder of the Mormons, Joseph Smith.One might have thought that she would connect revelation and revolution in modern fundamentalism. After all, religious terror is not confined to Islamic jihad. Christian crusades and Jewish holy wars still shape events from Hebron to Oklahoma But the present is too confusing.

Instead, after a demolition job on Jehovah’s Witnesses, she takes a strange deviation to the West Coast, and compares chiliastic prophecy with a few cranky attempts at immortality represented by the Biosphere in Arizona and a Cryonics expert in California. But dreams of fleshly resurrection are hardly new – nor even particularly apocalyptic. On this basis, chiropody could count as a millennial sect.With the odds so stacked against it, modernity has little chance. It’s no surprise to find Benjamin affecting disenchantment in disparaging asides about “our contorted world”.

This disillusion makes her vulnerable to apocalyptic thinking. The only antidote is to appreciate how the myth persists, its deep undercurrents clouding our secular culture.Bearded dreamers of the absolute have dominated vanguard politics for the past 200 years – with obvious results. Most icons of the avant-garde have been iconoclasts, celebrating what Bakunin called “creative destruction”. Benjamin’s error is to mourn a myth that is by no means buried.By the time she nears her own denouement, she ends up coming down on the side of the angels, and devils, rather than the mixed-up people in between. She claims we need the awe and trepidation of “living at the end” to stimulate our hope. This is a bit like saying that Tina Turner needs Ike, or that the state should sponsor artists by ensuring they have unhappy childhoods.During the domino collapse of European communism, Fay Weldon remarked, “The fin has come early this siecle.” Maybe it came too early. The perverse effect of this pre-millennial build-up is that it seems to have emptied 2000 of any real portent or threat – except for computer programmers.

But is this really a source of regret? Faced with a choice between champagne celebrations and psychotic final solutions, I know which I would choose Show me the way to the Millennium Dome Arm-a-geddon out.. There are countless sports that consider themselves extreme activities, and there are others which seem to go beyond common sense. Sky-surfing comprehensively proves that there is nothing on this earth, (or above it) that cannot be surfed. In addition to highlighting the thin line between sanity and madness, travelling at 120mph, with a board strapped to your legs, must score highly on the extreme barometer. “It’s totally awesome,” says Mike Frost who, as a skydiver, has been throwing himself out of flying objects for years, and sky-surfing for five “Sky-surfing is one of the most extreme sports in the world There’s virtually nothing that can touch it. People talk about extreme sports, but this is really out there on the limit.”
Like a fantastic plot from a DC comic, 25-year-old Frost is a suit-wearing city financier on the ground.

When in free-fall mode, he’s the current British Sky-Surfing Champion, the extrovert guy who’s pictured sky-surfing in the Extreme Polo Sport advertising campaign, and the last person that you’d expect to be frightened of heights (but maybe he just said that to make me feel better after I hastily turned down his offer to jump with him).”I saw sky surfing on television and thought it looked incredible,” he reveals “They were `carving’ at speeds of over 120 miles an hour. When you’re up there getting thrown around the sky, it’s the best feeling that you can have.”Frost first jumped with a snowboard, before progressing to a specially designed board made for sky-surfing. Costing around pounds 600, these weigh a mere three pounds and offer greater rigidity than a flexible snowboard. The former “feels like standing on concrete,” according to Frost.Most sky-surfers will have at least 100 skydiving jumps behind them before they take up the sport and know exactly how the human body can be manoeuvred in such conditions.