American enterprise

The title of A.A. Gill’s latest book comes from Emma Lazarus’s poem ‘The New Colossus’ (1883), which is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give me your tired, your poor… I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’ And its subtitle is a tribute to Alistair Cooke, who was a friend and colleague of Gill’s father, and ‘the most urbane, witty and readable journalist of his century’. Urbanity is hardly Gill’s forte, but he is often witty and always readable.

‘This book,’ he explains, ‘is the view of the New World from the Old.’ He might more modestly and accurately have called it ‘a view’, as it is intended to challenge the view of many European intellectuals that Americans are stupid, ignorant, arrogant and so on. He rightly argues that such sneering abuse is itself stupid, ignorant and arrogant, and that ‘America is Europe’s greatest invention’.