No such charge can be levelled at Mishra, whose book, Bland Fanatics, is a collection of sweeping polemics written over the past decade for various publications. Mishra’s targets are the Western elites who read and write for the Economist, the New York Times, the Financial Times and other publications.

In his view most of us are captives to a class and race nostalgia that mourn for the days when Britannia ruled the waves, and America’s global writ ran uncontested. These are the “isolated and vain chattering class that, all shook up by a changing world, sought to reassure themselves and us by digging an unbridgeable Maginot Line around our minds and hearts.” That phantom moat was neoliberalism. Its class of “bland fanatics” has sought to reinvent the west as a benign global force. In so doing, they have purged its history of its “smelly past of ethnocide, slavery and racism — and the ongoing stink of corporate venality — from their perfumed notion of Anglo-American superiority.” And on he goes. Mishra’s writing can sometimes be compelling. But his spleen often seems larger than his otherwise impressive brain.

“It already seems clear that the racial supremacist in the White House and many of his opponents are engaged in the same endeavour: to extend closing time in their own gardens in the West,” says Mishra. He provides scant back-up for this except to point out that his targets come from privileged western backgrounds. Mishra should be more reflective about tarnishing a person’s ideas by their status. Since he is married to a leading publisher who is a cousin of Britain’s former prime minister, David Cameron, while his father-in-law was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, Mishra’s motives could be distorted in an equally arbitrary way. By Mishra’s yardstick he thus belongs to the “bien pensant” classes he reviles.