“... is heightened by the raw, primordial tenor of our politics, above all in the United States. What Pankaj Mishra has called an ‘age of anger’ is also an age of disinhibition, at least on the political right, and it is embodied by the US president, who has set in train a loosening of moral restraints in every sphere. The United States is now governed ...”

“... perhaps wasn’t aware that Sholokhov is Mo Yan’s favourite Russian writer). Only Pankaj Mishra, writing in the Guardian, took a different tack. He asked why writers under authoritarian regimes were always being called to account for their complicity while writers in liberal democracies were rarely charged with the same: Rushdie himself ...”

“... over in the Indian subcontinent: the fiction writer who is also a travel writer. One can see why Pankaj Mishra may read and review Naipaul with an Oedipal frisson. Vatermord or ancestor worship? It can be a hard choice. The five essays in this volume mostly revisit earlier moments in Naipaul’s work. The first essay refers back to the Caribbean of ...”

“... us, has been a mainly male discourse since its inception in the 1870s). ‘No Muslim country,’ Pankaj Mishra wrote recently, ‘has ever done as much as Turkey to make itself over in the image of a European nation-state.’ ‘To see honour as a traditional concept,’ Sirman writes, ‘is to render invisible the modes through which it still regulates ...”