Perry Anderson speaks the truth

"Beneath the veneer of worldliness it still affects, what the New Yorker delivers today is mostly a sententious conformism."

A certain puzzling affection for today's cricket-bitten Tambram, his confident generalizations, his taste for the Dickensian locution, his hard-won, abashed smiles; smiles which arrive punctually, like buses or army brats, on his oblong face, and whose presence, sensed belatedly, seems to surprise no one more than himself.