This book, which has been called a sequel to Gilroy’s groundbreaking work There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack (1987) analyzes the post-9/11 political climate and its attack on certain key concepts of multiculturalism and cosmopolitan conceptions of the possibility of living with difference. In his specific analysis of British society, Gilroy employs the concept of melancholia to explain the country’s ‘failure to come to terms’ with the loss of its imperial status, and suggests that racial hatred and violence directed at immigrants can be understood as an impotent reaction against such unresolved feelings of loss.