Francis Fukuyama has a crack in his credenza. He has just noticed it running like a vein through the top of the sideboard, which takes pride of place in his rather bijou dining room. He is perturbed by this unexpected blight on what appears to be an otherwise flawless work that took him two years to complete.

The bulky, reddish-brown piece is made of Monterey cypress – the same, Seussian species that I can see from the kitchen window standing beyond the finely manicured backyard on the Monterey Peninsula in California.