Sublime

But in the world of satisfying stories—her preferred domain—both of Olivia’s parents are so much less than they should have been.

his story expressed one of the unappeasable longings of the human imagination: the idea of a perfected society in which the world’s lost innocence will be restored and the Golden Age before the Fall will return.

‘You’ve heard something?’ asked Paul Ziller, the leader of the Ziller Quartet. He had no work permit, his quartet was disbanded, but each day he went to the Jewish Day Centre to practise in an unused cloakroom, and each night he dressed up in a cummerbund to play bogus gypsy music in a Hungarian restaurant in exchange for his food.

So if humans are needed neither as producers nor as consumers, what will safeguard their physical survival and their psychological well-being?

As Herzl was writing in German in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the best-known Jew in the English-speaking world was Israel Zangwill.