Pankaj Mishra is one of our great thinkers whose essays and books explain the big cultural and political trends of our times moving from Beijing to Cairo, Delhi to Paris, the eighteenth century to the twenty first. In this outstanding collection of his recent writing, Mishra centers on the end of liberalism – its history and the contradictions within it which have led to its decline. Wide-ranging and full of ideas, the essays talk about, among other things, Salman Rushdie, the self-help guru Jordan Peterson, The Economist magazine and Brexit. This is another sparkling, combative book full of ideas and forceful arguments from one of our leading essayists and cultural critics.