Europe remains remarkably free of racism

This book is an exercise in crying wolf that utterly fails to prove its main thesis: that Europe is abandoning its core liberal values under threat from a resurgent populist right. It is a largely fact-free polemic that passes itself off as an open-minded work of interview reportage. Yet if you can ignore the author’s sly interventions on behalf of his left-liberal premises, he does introduce the reader to a fascinating cast of characters, mainly from the European populist right.

And, at least for someone (like me) who is predisposed to an interest in the subject, he also provides real insight into the internal debates about immigration and national identity, above all in France, the Netherlands and Denmark, that you could never glean from reading the newspapers in the English-speaking world.

There is also an original and unexpected chapter on a subject that seldom breaks cover: the violent hostility to mass immigration in South Africa, which in 2009 received 340,000 asylum claims, many from an imploding Zimbabwe.