Pankaj Mishra French Quotations

The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.

The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan.

German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.