Sublime

As uncertainty and precarity become the new normal, so governmental regimes have shifted their focus from how to secure us to how to make us resilient. Security, and the longing for it, have become a kind of pathology. We are no longer to expect or seek certainty but rather to embrace and accept challenge and danger, a state of perpetual emergency…

sanest guide through the turbulence and hatred of human politics is a humorous and self-deprecating pessimism.

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

[Was Zafar] the original mover, the head and front of the undertaking, or but the consenting tool…the forward, unscrupulous, but still pliant puppet, tutored by priestly craft for the advancement of religious bigotry? Many persons, I believe, will incline to the latter. The known restless spirit of Mahommedan fanaticism has been the first aggressor

“…the stammerings of an old man who does not seem to have achieved a full psychic victory over an awkward adolescence…”