Across the literary pages: Pankaj Mishra

An easy, sure-fire way of generating a bit of publicity is picking a fight with a provocative public intellectual. Rather than criticising Bernard-Henri Lévy’s blow-dry, or kicking David Starkey in either of his legs, Pankaj Mishra memorably attacked Niall Ferguson in his review of Civilisation in the LRB last November. So the threat of a lawsuit from Ferguson now means we all vaguely know who Mishra is. (And that he’s married to David Cameron’s cousin.) His latest book From the Ruins of Empire – part biography of three prominent Eastern thinkers and part historical analysis – tackles the difficult relationship between East and West taking the Japanese destruction of the Russian warship in the battle of Tsushima in 1905 as its starting point.  John Gray in The Independent called it a ‘penetrating and disquieting’ account of the illusions and disillusions prevalent on each side. Mark Mazower in the Financial Times couldn’t help but agree that the book had the ‘power to instruct and even to shock.’