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“... During​ the big antiwar protests in early 2003, Ta-Nehisi Coates was a deliveryman for a deli in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He, too, was ‘sceptical’, he wrote a decade later in a blog post for the Atlantic, ‘but if the US was going to take out a mad tyrant, who was I to object?’ After all, as Coates remembered, ‘every “sensible” and “serious” person you knew – left or right – was for the war ...”

“... I first visited Indonesia in 1995. For someone from India, as I was, to arrive in a country that was once part of the Hindu-Buddhist ecumene was to drift into a pleasurable dream where minor figures familiar from childhood readings of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata loomed over city squares. The Dutch, unlike the British in India, had inflicted few obviously self-aggrandising monuments on the country they exploited ...”

“... The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe ...”

“... In Kathmandu this March, I met a Nepalese businessman who said he knew what had provoked Crown Prince Dipendra, supposed incarnation of Vishnu and former pupil at Eton, to mass murder. On the night of 1 June 2001, Dipendra appeared in the drawing-room of the royal palace in Kathmandu, dressed in combat fatigues, apparently out of it on Famous Grouse and hashish, and armed with assault rifles and pistols ...”

“... In​ 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry came across press reports of the systematic torture of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. Arrested in Belgium in 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally tortured by the Gestapo, and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to survive, but could never look at his torments as things of the past ...”

“... whose interests it is run and an angry multitude whose interests are ignored. And in this regard, Pankaj Mishra’s account in Age of Anger is not particularly novel. Recent political events have made it impossible to ignore the division between ‘an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses’ and ...”

“... has lost any talent it once had for compromise and pragmatism, has become unmoored from reality. Pankaj Mishra in the New York Times drew a straight line from decolonisation to the ‘aggressive ignorance of English Brexiteers’: ‘none of this would surprise anyone who knows of the unconscionable breeziness with which the British ruling class first ...”

“... Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a ...”

“... I found he was hardly taught, or read. In an essay on Narayan in the New York Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra observes that his novels begin with great energy and promise, and then fail to resolve themselves. This, he says, is because in their structure and movement, they mirror the societies in which their characters live – societies in which ...”

“... Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the first day, we hid in the Mins’ka metro ...”

“... in suicide belts, bombs and the virgins of heaven’ – a textbook example of what Pankaj Mishra has called the ‘genitals-centric explanation’ of radical Islam. Rushdie presents his version of The Arabian Nights as the founding legend of the new civilisation that will emerge after the apocalyptic battle between good and evil. In this ...”

“... sing to me about G now are largely those that baffled or terrified me when I was first there. (Pankaj Mishra is right: there is so much in that Rousseau word ressentir, ‘to feel for a second time’.) Often these are minority or transient phenomena: the senses recoil from the brute humidity and stifling, often sunless, heat of the days here. There ...”

“... about 40 per cent know Hindi. I’m taking these figures both from Khair and from an article by Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books. Readers and writers of English are thus a tiny minority, but Khair quotes the critic Harish Travedi as saying ‘it is this tiny minority which is the privileged, prosperous, decision-making new ruling caste of ...”

“... 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 ...”