‘The abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exempl
![Pankaj Mishra · Flailing States: Anglo-America Loses its Grip](https://cdn-ak-scissors.b.st-hatena.com/image/square/f7a63b3a6d80692db94c22382a0922489e8dfbc6/height=288;version=1;width=512/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lrb.co.uk%2Fstorage%2Fsocial_image%2Fimages%2F1%2F5%2F5%2F3%2F22373551-1-eng-GB%2FMishra-Web.jpg)