A review “Whereas previous works sketched impressive if inevitably tendentious genealogies of the present – and were greatly aided in that effort by Curtis’s skill not just as a researcher but as an interviewer – the gain in affective texture in the new series is at the expense of its argument about how we got here. A dogged hostility to what he sees as the debilitating leftist academic narrative of neoliberalism (the ‘n-word’, as he dismissed it in a recent interview), and the effort to trace the mood rather than the origins or structure of our present, leaves an aesthetic of explanation without the required content or complexity – the capture of emotion without the current of history.” Dreamworlds of Catastrophe
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51