Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1816 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-24
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

John Banville, Guardian
'Brilliant, frightening, devastating'

A.S. Byatt
'Wise, furious and informative'

Andrew Marr
'The closest thing we have to a window-smashing French intellectual'

Customer Reviews

A forceful analysis of modern politics
John Gray's central thesis is that both liberal and neoconservative politics are flawed because they think forms of democracy are both attractive and historically inevitable.And in this they have merely taken on the mantle of religion,with democracy a secular version of the dream of utopia or heaven.Such simplicity and certainty is dangerous and not unlike commununism and fascism. Well-written and well-argued, I found myself agreeing with much of what Gray says. What stopped me giving him five stars was some carelessness here and there:a certain amount of repetition and the fact that in one chapter he says that there were no concentration camps in Russia, while saying the exact opposite in another. But these are really small gripes. The analysis of Blair's stance on Iraq is particularly good.