Bland Fanatics remains timely, addressing an issue that consumes us: race.

Bland Fanatics has its pleasures.

[Bland Fanatics] lays out the case in essays dating back to 2008. Reading them now, while trapped in an apartment surrounded by strategic reserves of canned food and toilet paper, it’s hard not to think: You know, he might have had a point..

With chapters telling different aspects of this story across numerous regions and historical eras, Mishra supplies readers with material to construct an alternative to the liberal Grand Narrative.

Bland Fanatics is a collection of essays published over that time that range from excoriations of Niall Ferguson and Salman Rushdie, to a study of US president Woodrow Wilson’s hypocrisy over his support for national self-determination, to an unpacking of the irrationality of western attitudes to Islam. It was a provocative thesis, exhilarating in parts but infuriating, too, in its flattening of historical nuance.

Bland Fanatics points to the tragic irony in how the very same cheerleaders of Western civilisation may have in fact engineered their own decline.

The greatest contribution of Mishra’s work is its indefatigable insistence that places long considered marginal belong in the foreground of modern political history. He isn’t just interested in righting the balance between the West and the rest; he questions whether one can even separate the two. What distinguishes Mishra’s energetic and often pugilistic writing is not necessarily the point of its attack—the withering, if familiar, broadsides against the callous actions of Western powers and postcolonial states—but rather its angle. Mishra sees the present as a historian; the tremors on the surface reveal deep currents.

... a searing critique of western liberalism ....

Mishra’s best essays treat figures in literature, from Salman Rushdie to Alexander Herzen, through whose work and reception he unveils, in another way, the perspectives we miss as long as the narrative of Western liberalism persists. The essays often leave readers with these welcome outlooks. Considering the collection as a whole, readers may wonder less about the evidence of neo-liberalism—which is ample enough—than the reasons behind it. The blandness of the neoliberal fanatics, whose views often warrant less analytical attention than given, at times overshadows the real merit of the essays, which bring into focus the blindness that persists in this long-discussed but still ubiquitous belief in the unmitigated benefits of free-market capital.

... this erudite and dryly witty collection will help readers to make sense of the current age of discontent..