Nick Cohen’s books are like the best Smiths songs; however depressing the content, the execution is so shimmering, so incandescent with indignation that the overall effect is transcendently uplifting. In 2007’s What’s Left, the last book which I felt compelled to order by the dozen and press upon whoever came to the door (a few Jehovah’s Witnesses went away with more than they bargained for) he examined the truly repulsive spectacle of “how the liberal left of the 20th century came to support the far right of the 21st.” That is, how the enemies of sexism, racism, homophobia and religious mania came to embrace all of those evils in their eagerness to suck up to the last beacon of anti-Americanism: political Islam.

Still, it wasn’t the first time that a strand of Islamism had found itself in bed with an unlikely playmate. In his new book You Can’t Read