"[1] Ahmed Iqbal in The Independent wrote, "The chapters are entitled Shock, Shame, Anger, Denial and Guilt – as if lifted from a textbook on popular psychology.
The author's disillusionment with multiculturalism begins well before 9/11, when he reads a report on the future of cultural diversity in Britain compiled by men and women who are liberal in their outlook.
"[2] John Lloyd wrote in The Observer, "The guilty liberalism he excoriates, in a book that retains a force and a passion and an insistence that you examine the thoughts you think that you think through some 300 finely written pages, is not a definition of the contemporary left, but a barrier to its development.
"[3] Nick Hornby in The Believer called it "A timely, pertinent, and brilliantly argued book about the crisis in left-liberalism.
[5] In this memoir, he recounts such episodes as a youthful excursion to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas, Anthony Cape called it the best first-hand description of "the way comprehensive education and the right-on educational philosophies of 1970s schoolteachers let a bright boy from a poor background down," that he had ever read.