'I'm writing these words in the days after the ascension of a vainglorious braggart and swindler to the most powerful role on the planet, and evidently I'm not alone in feeling that the ground has given way beneath our feet. Those of us who came of age in the years after 1989 could be forgiven for feeling cheated. Hadn't the end of History come with the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Pax Americana the rock on which global peace and prosperity was to be founded? We grew up and accepted as eternal something that has turned out to be built on a fault line, and now the earthquake has come.' (Editorial Introduction)