“Gary Younge steers a course between two unacceptable extremes: the naive denial that identity matters and the dangerous assertion that it matters above all else. Most of the ideas he puts forward have been formulated elsewhere, as his quotations from the likes of Stuart Hall, Alasdair MacIntyre and Amartya Sen attest. But what Younge’s book achieves which more academic treatises do not is that it makes the abstract concrete, showing us rather than just telling us how identity matters in the lives of people around the world.”