In a mutedly lit, wood-paneled, book-lined, teal-colored upstairs room in a converted Victorian house on Old Queen Street in Westminster, Britain’s leading Cassandra is telling a roomful of bright young things a murder story.
The brasserie downstairs and the bar across the landing have emptied, and there’s standing room only to hear former Oxford don John Gray, whom Pankaj Mishra calls “the most prescient of British public intellectuals,” expand on the arguments of his new book, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. The vibe is that of a senior common room as Gray sits back comfortably in an armchair, like a latter-day M. R. James, to give his audience a good fright.
