“There is no doubt that we’re living in anti-utopian times. The political imagination is, if not dead exactly, certainly in a coma. Politics today is about fiddling, making a tweak here or there but not changing anything much. We can’t conceive of a future much better than the present. Perhaps we imagine that computers will be quicker and mobile phones cleverer, but there is little notion that human beings could live vastly more fulfilled and improved lives than our own. There is no sense that history holds possibilities that we haven’t yet imagined. Utopian impulses persist, of course, but these impulses are for the most part expressed in banal ways.”