The concept of ‘the West’ seems to mean anything you like

A hundred years ago, T.S. Eliot wrote to Geoffrey Faber, for whose publishing company he had just started work, complaining: ‘The Defence of the West… is a subject about which everyone thinks he has something to say.’ Plus ça change ? Back then, people were coming to terms with a war that had shown the West to be neither as unified nor as civilised as had been assumed. A century on, American isolationism, demographic decline, mass immigration, Islamism and a slow but decisive shift in global economic gravity are giving commentators the opportunity to bloviate endlessly about the decline/suicide/end/decay/of the West.

But what exactly it is that we are defending or lamenting is far from clear. Georgios Varouxakis’s The West attempts to answer that question. It is a seriously impressive