Oy, Tolstoy! Clear off, mate. Brexit means fucking Brexit!

There's something quite sad about seeing a small island race becoming, well, ..er..a small island race. At critical junctures maybe some trait, characteristic or sensibility that has for large periods of time been hidden suddenly rises to the surface. So, even though under normal circumstances it isn't a dominant feature of an individual's or a society's make-up, at points of transition it rears its head. Hasn't there been something petty and mean-spirited brewing for the last thirty odd years of the neoliberal experiment? Is it something more permanent?

The closing of the American/British mind? This goes beyond the narrowing of horizons that results in our attention being caught up in all the trivia and information flotsam that streams in front of us, 24/7. And beyond the shallow, everyday kind of racism that offers an animal-like warmth of petty hatreds to a working class that has lost its bearings. I think it extends further: to a middle class that is enamoured by shopping or private fantasies of drug or alcohol-induced flights from reality; it extends to the self-styled religious folks whose bitterness at the direction the world is taking results in a cheap cynicism and condescension.

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Calasso's The Art of the Publisher: