Mara Delius

‘Now that I am about to leave, I realise how uniquely American is the craving for “change”’

‘Alumni could be an integral part of saving European institutions of learning from becoming the Costa cafés of the academy’

‘Why do grown men in the Tea Party dress up as George Washington?’

‘The image of the newspaperman as a suave but ballsy individual who, whisky in hand, wires copy to a smoke-filled newsroom is now incredibly remote’

‘In the Old World, a leader is criticised — and quits — for being too emotional. In the New World, a leader is criticised for not being emotional enough’

‘Don’t believe what they say about California: it is still the matrix for our civilisation’

‘Should we treat assimilation not as a taboo subject but as an opportunity?’

‘American academia is being swamped by the backwaters of identity politics’

‘This is a cautionary tale about a deception so delicious yet so serious that it causes us to reconsider the impact of the public intellectual on our culture’

‘Entertaining the reader is now the main goal of criticism’