Age of Anger: a history of the present
PANKAJ MISHRA

What is going on? What’s ­happening to the world? Has everybody gone mad? As a reader of the books pages in a learned journal, no doubt you’ve likely been asking yourself some of those questions these past few years. It was confusing enough back in 2010 when, in the teeth of the worst financial crisis and global recession in eight decades, people began ­electing governments pledged to perpetuate the policies that had caused the disaster in the first place.

But now, six years on, and with those policies still abjectly failing, the increasingly impoverished people of the United States have decided that a plutocrat demagogue is the man most likely to stick it to his fellow billionaires. Meanwhile the citizens of at least parts of our own disunited kingdom have decided that the reason they’re getting poorer isn’t that the Government is using public money to pay down the debts of the banksters, but it’s because the country is signed up to a trading organisation whose 500 million members are among the richest people in the world. Confused? I know I am. But here to help guide us through the chaos is Pankaj Mishra’s scintillating Age of Anger.