Robert Hughes’s Culture of Complaint is a polemical account of American public life in the early 1990s: grievance politics, collapsing civic language, institutional timidity and the growing habit of treating offence as a substitute for argument.

Hughes attacks both conservative moralism and progressive orthodoxies, especially the tendency of cultural institutions to confuse symbolic recognition with political change. The book is unmistakably of its moment. Its language around identity politics can now feel blunt, and some of its targets have aged into caricature. What remains useful is Hughes’s resistance to intellectual tribalism and his insistence that democratic culture requires standards, memory and the ability to survive disagreement. It is best read not as a neutral diagnosis but as a period document in the culture wars: energetic, exasperated and revealing about the liberal anxiety of the era.

Harvill, 1994 revised and augmented paperback edition. Light cover rubbing, creasing and edge wear.