Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra writes: Niall Ferguson’s strenuous attempts to distinguish himself from Stoddard – which make him flag his differences with, of all people, George Wallace – are misplaced. Hardly anyone is a racist in the Stoddardian sense today, even if they raise the alarm against Muslim ‘colonisers’ of a ‘senescent’ Europe, or fret about feckless white Americans being outpaced by hard-working...

Sanjay Subrahmanyam doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in his literary taxonomies when he presents Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as an instance of ‘magical realism’ and makes Lee Siegel, an estimable American scholar, appear to be an Indian novelist (LRB, 6 November). Breezily positing ‘two broad categories’ of Indian writers in English, he ignores a host of stylistically original...