All the rage | 30 June 2012

New York
The western world seems not just unhappy, but intoxicated with anger. It is the kind of anger that feeds on itself. Offence is not just taken but relished, and multiplied as in a hall of mirrors.

I have a name for this kind of anger. A few years ago, in a book about how Americans had learned to brush aside their old ethic of self-control and plunge into the delights of sneering and rage, I christened it the ‘new anger’.