It is, perhaps, most simply described as the author’s investigation of exactly how, in artistic terms, something is made from nothing, or vice versa, as in the case of the destruction of the World Trade Centre in Lower Manhattan – an event which the incendiary composer Karlheinz Stockhausen foolishly described soon afterwards as ‘the greatest work of art for the whole Cosmos’. Try telling that to the New York City Fire Department.

There are numerous memorable passages, such as the discussion of Blake’s Newton, the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux and other places, the meaning of Hebrew letters, Hamlet, Don Giovanni, St Augustine, Wagner and human digits in a number of highly stimulating contexts. It is striking that, with what Owen Chadwick called the secularisation of the European mind in the nineteenth century, came a somewhat alarming, surprisingly widespread tendency among many artists to claim for themselves a ‘god identity’, divine powers and a corresponding inclination to throw their weight around. The moderns tend to create their own legitimising myths of primordial origins, most of them wacky.

The sheer bulk of the material harnessed by Conrad is best demonstrated by looking closely at the tenth chapter, titled ‘Author of Himself’, which is about Shakespeare. The attitude of Leonardo’s drawing of Vitruvian man, who stands inside a square and a circle, is at first compared with the Creation of Adam fresco by Michelangelo on the Sistine ceiling. Vitruvian man ‘relies on his body to propel him through space’. Shakespeare is different, because his powers are mental, not physical. Through Hamlet, Dumas thought he saw how it was possible ‘to create a world’. So did Berlioz, breathlessly co-opting the language of the Lord’s Prayer. Shakespeare, to Berlioz, was ‘our father in heaven’. For Carlyle, Shakespeare never failed to be both loving and just, in other words eminently godlike, while Coleridge saw him as ‘the Spinozistic deity’.

The attitudes toward Shakespeare of Goethe and Hugo come next, along with some intriguing, rather buoyant comparisons made by nineteenth-century critics: between Shakespeare and Dante, and Shakespeare and Milton. Pico della Mirandola, G.K. Chesterton, Havelock Ellis and Calvino are added to the mix, as well as J.M.W. Turner, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of what Hugo chose to see as the Promethean legacy of certain of Shakespeare’s plays. In this chapter alone, Conrad makes shrewd remarks about The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Coriolanus, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Cymbeline, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus.

Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, ‘having read Ernest Jones’s essay on the Oedipus complex in Hamlet’, sees Shakespeare as the mother of his characters. Can you pack any more than this into one, relatively brief sentence? The writing is fresh and vivid, but I found it almost impossible to keep up with the astonishing pace and density of the argumentation: ‘Shakespeare creates a world,’ Conrad concludes, ‘then lets his people smilingly destroy it.’ The thrust of the chapter seems to be that every generation tends to deify its own Shakespeare, and that this is hardly surprising. Elsewhere, the author remarks: ‘“One man,” as Hugo acknowledged, “has no right to be everything!” But Shakespeare had managed the feat.’

The problem is that in its boisterous and energetic way the book tends to whirl through many other creators, artists and critics with the same rapid-fire determination to synthesise as much as possible. At times it feels like the critical equivalent of claiming so many scalps. And in seeking to locate what many people might once have chosen to call artistic genius, Conrad seems actually to affirm it and to push towards a point at which the creative spark becomes a kind of substitute for the divine. I do not think that this is what he intends to achieve, but nevertheless the point becomes more striking the farther the author casts his net, and he casts it very widely. The index yields the following sequences: Blade Runner, William Blake, Der Blaue Reiter, Karl Blossfeld, and Giovanni Boccaccio and, later, holy ghost, Homer, homunculus, Richard Hooker, Hopi snake dance and Gerard Manley Hopkins. None of which makes for a gentle, patient, or slow and steady exposition of the grand theme of artistic creativity, even though Conrad offers an expert demonstration of its symphonic dimension, and its inherent complexities.

In the final chapter, Conrad’s struggle to account for the human creative instinct in the secular age leads him to argue that

We create because the world was not created; we create even though, given the randomness of universal ends and beginnings, there may be no point in doing so. The macrocosm burst into life, and is traveling either forwards or backwards towards an equally convulsive end. All the more reason, in that case, for us to value the carefully shaped microcosms we are able to make, which can be set apart from the world’s stealthy entropic decay – the chiming spheres of Pythagoras or Schoenberg’s vibrant rows of notes; Bosch’s glass retort or Coleridge’s dome in which fire and ice comingle; Abbot Suger’s jeweled flagon or Keats’s Grecian urn or Wagner’s lambent Grail; the perfect circle drawn by Giotto or Klee’s perky erectile triangles.

Leaving aside the question as to whether any of these products of civilisation may be protected against processes of entropic decay, the main and obvious objection to this line of reasoning is that, if there really is no point to the wheeling cosmos, what is the point of all those microcosms we invent, apart from killing time and looking busy?

It is a gloomy, strangely passive world view, which offers little in the way of protection against the destroyers of the Bamiyan buddhas, for example, and other declared enemies of culture. By contrast, the human instinct for preservation, which ideally keeps our museums, theatres, universities and libraries ticking over – and is slowly but surely turning our attention to repairing the damage we have done to the natural environment – must surely reveal a moral dimension, and a shared framework far more ethically responsive than the view underlying Conrad’s remark: ‘For good or ill, man is now his own god: both a world-builder and a destroyer of worlds.’

Art is good, not ill. We need it as much as we need clean water and enough to eat. A world in which ‘it is too late to regret the audacity of the uncontrollable, invaluable beings who first questioned the limits placed on thoughts and dreams’ (i.e. artists), in which, in other words, men will be gods and there is nothing we should or can do about that except to understand that it is so, seems to me a frighteningly vulnerable and dangerous place.