While reading this book I was reminded of the great ‘scandal’ among New York’s intelligentsia in 1982 when the then beauty queen of the left-literary world, Susan Sontag, speaking in support of Polish Solidarity, delivered herself of what would have been a truism to most ordinary people but came as a bombshell to her audience of ‘progressives’ in the Town Hall: ‘Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only [the left-wing] Nation or the New Statesman.