Sublime

Calcutta diarist William Hickey’s

As the filmmaker Adam Curtis told The Economist, ‘People are frightened of instability. But the job of a good politician is to give them a story that says “yes this is risky, but it’s also thrilling and it might just lead to something extraordinary.”’

how was it that Disraeli, a bankrupt Jewish school dropout and trashy novelist, came to exert such a hold on the Victorian Conservative Party,

the mental inertia that John Stuart Mill called the ‘deep slumber of a decided opinion’.

Within less than two years of the Treaty of Nanking, predicted the free-trade Friend of China, ‘the Tartar of Central Asia will trim his beard with Sheffield scissors, and every spinster in Peking must have a Coventry ribbon’.35

Anna Monkland’s Calcutta novel Life in India,

for those whose politics is founded on nostalgia, there is no need for imagination.

However, since the global financial crisis of 2008 people all over the world have become increasingly disillusioned with the liberal story. Walls and firewalls are back in vogue. Resistance to immigration and to trade agreements is mounting. Ostensibly democratic governments undermine the independence of the judiciary system, restrict the freedom o