A Spot of Firm Government “Criticism is becoming a minor offshoot of science fiction, even if it presents the exotic and outlandish only to upbraid such notions as imperialist. ‘We are obsessed with “barbarians”,’ Claude Rawson remarks in this erudite, passionate book”, God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492-1945. London Review of Books