RaveThe GuardianIt is suffused... by a deep sense of sadness, and of despondency even amid hope ... Izgil’s memoir is a story about how to survive in, and to negotiate one’s way through, a society in which repression has become routine ... The tension in the narrative flows from the dread captured in the title.
Christopher Clark
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Magnificent ... Clark does a remarkable job weaving together the myriad strands that make up the narrative, allowing us to see the events in granular detail and with synoptic, Europe-wide vision ... Perhaps the most important thread running through Revolutionary Spring is the fraught relationship, and often open conflict, between liberals and radicals.
Priya Satia
PositiveThe GuardianTime’s Monster is a coruscating and important reworking of the relationship between history, historians and empire. It is also a frustrating account. The thread running through Time’s Monster is the need to understand the catastrophic consequences of rooting ethical claims in particular historical narratives ... Time’s Monster helps lay bare the discipline of history’s \'collusion in empire\'. It also reveals, however, perhaps unwittingly, what remains valuable in Enlightenment ideas of history and of humanity.
Pankaj Mishra
MixedThe Guardian (US)Bland Fanatics is a collection of essays published over that time that range from excoriations of Niall Ferguson and Salman Rushdie, to a study of US president Woodrow Wilson’s hypocrisy over his support for national self-determination, to an unpacking of the irrationality of western attitudes to Islam. It was a provocative thesis, exhilarating in parts but infuriating, too, in its flattening of historical nuance ... What is missing in Bland Fanatics is any attempt to analyse liberalism in the round ... There is much that is valuable in Mishra’s writings, opening up as they do new perspectives in the debate about liberalism and about the relationship between the west and the global south. It’s a pity that there is also much that obscures even as it illuminates.
Eric Kaufmann
PanThe GuardianWhiteshift is a hefty work crammed with data and graphs. The trouble with viewing the world primarily in demographic terms, though, is that, for all the facts and figures, it is easy to be blind to the social context ... demography is a blunt tool through which to make sense of social hostility. Key in understanding the shift from class to ethnicity are perceptions of change, not just of ethnicity but also of class ... Kaufmann wants to normalize attachment to \'white identity.\' Historically, such identity has been the means through which to promote racism. Today, many on the far right use it as a way of rebranding their bigotry ... Kaufmann’s argument is, ironically, the mirror image of that of leftwing identitarians; both see whiteness as a homogenizing label, one for a repository of privilege, the other for common interests.
