Desire and Fate

Brilliant and unsparing essays on the blind spots and maladies of contemporary culture.
Ours is an ill-mannered society that wears those bad manners as a badge not just of its moral rectitude but of its millenarian ethical ambitions. At the same time, in no society in recent memory have people been so easily affronted.

At a time when political writing and cultural criticism have come to be dominated by an insipid and unthinking moralism, David Rieffs essays offer a bracing antidote. As well as being one of the English-speaking worlds most perceptive commentators on global politics, Rieff has in recent years been one of its most courageous and outspoken critics of the pathologies of identity politicsin particular, its grossly simplistic understanding of what it means to belong to a culture or a community, its fundamental failure to grasp the real value of the creative arts, and its increasing disregard for due process and freedom of