The World That Never Was
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Review
This is an amazing book full of incredible people all of whom turn out to be real and unbelievable stories, all of which turn out be true. Against a backdrop of late nineteenth century Europe and America in which staggering industrial progress went hand-in-hand with mass poverty and class struggle, Butterworth brilliantly teases out the paths and plots of the dedicated revolutionaries, deadly dilettantes, spies, informants, agents provocateurs, false counts and femmes fatales who made up the international anarchist movement, and its enemies. A genuine tour de force. --David Aaronovitch
Historian Butterworth makes a first-rate addition to the growing list of books dealing with terrorism's origins and history... Delivering a virtuoso performance, Butterworth adds the hope that history will not repeat itself and that a successful new bloody ideology will not create the next scourge --Publisher's Weekly - starred review
A narrative taut with intrigue and freighted with contemporary significance --Booklist, Bryce Christensen
Intriguing, provocative and written with a novelist's eye for detail, this book is an engrossing journey into a murky, subterranean world
--BBC History Magazine, Mike Rapport
"...a riveting account, teeming with intrigue and adventure and packed with the most astonishing characters..." -- The New Statesman
"...this is a thrilling and important book -- not least for its unmasking of the forces of reaction..." --The Sunday Times
'... a riveting account, teeming with intrigue and adventure and packed with the most astonishing characters.' --New Statesman
'... an impressive work which will captivate those unfamiliar with anarchist history and teach even specialists much...' --Independent
'Butterworth, in this wide-ranging account... does justice to both sides of the picture - the glowing ideal, its shady enactment.'
--Telegraph
"Exhilarating... Almost any paragraph packs more action than an entire Dan Brown novel." --The Financial Times
`This is an exhilarating gallop through the history of anarchism'
--Financial Times
Historian Butterworth makes a first-rate addition to the growing list of books dealing with terrorism's origins and history... Delivering a virtuoso performance, Butterworth adds the hope that history will not repeat itself and that a successful new bloody ideology will not create the next scourge --Publisher's Weekly - starred review
A narrative taut with intrigue and freighted with contemporary significance --Booklist, Bryce Christensen
Intriguing, provocative and written with a novelist's eye for detail, this book is an engrossing journey into a murky, subterranean world
--BBC History Magazine, Mike Rapport
"...a riveting account, teeming with intrigue and adventure and packed with the most astonishing characters..." -- The New Statesman
"...this is a thrilling and important book -- not least for its unmasking of the forces of reaction..." --The Sunday Times
'... a riveting account, teeming with intrigue and adventure and packed with the most astonishing characters.' --New Statesman
'... an impressive work which will captivate those unfamiliar with anarchist history and teach even specialists much...' --Independent
'Butterworth, in this wide-ranging account... does justice to both sides of the picture - the glowing ideal, its shady enactment.'
--Telegraph
"Exhilarating... Almost any paragraph packs more action than an entire Dan Brown novel." --The Financial Times
`This is an exhilarating gallop through the history of anarchism'
--Financial Times
Book Description
A masterly exploration of the strange twists and turns of history, The World That Never Was is a true story of dreamers, schemers, anarchists and secret agents of the late nineteenth century.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This really is a ridiculously enjoyable and interesting book, somehow keeping the narrative going across innumerable conspiratorial cells from St Petersburg to London, the whole thing a mass of infernal devices, inflammatory public meetings, agents provocateurs, garottes and black propaganda. Butterworth does an excellent job of balancing events and ideology and his own struggle between fascination and disgust with his subject makes the whole book far far more than a mere recitation of outrages of yesteryear. The book is almost better on the police than on the anarchists, with great material on the disastrous role of police double agents of the kind dramatized in Under Western Eyes. The Russian Revolution has retrospectively swept away pre-1914 anarchism and made it appear a futile dead-end, with Marx's descendants rather than Kropotkin's inheriting history - but most of the heavy-lifting from 1870 onwards was done by the anarchists, who spent decades spectacularly taking out a lot random members of the ruling class, albeit on the whole to little substantive effect. The author must have worked his way heroically through a lot of borderline repetitive anarchist pamphlets and minutes to meetings and it is a tribute to his labours that he successfully shields the reader from much of the day-to-day tedium of anarchist life. It is tempting in a review like this to talk about some of the many fun details he throws in (there really are some extraordinary cast members) but it would be a disservice to the reader, who should be allowed the full sense of surprise lurking in each chapter of this terrific book.
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A gripping tale told well which never patronises nor proselytizes. It makes no overt attempt to but does provoke thought about contemporary freedoms and the place of lawlessness in any overbearing social order.
The subject was alien territory for me so the introduction and prologue seemed heavy going as the author compacted plenty of thought and fact into powerful sentences. Thereafter the sentence structure opened and it was a pleasurable downhill romp until in the final chapter one hits the Bolsheviks and one knows that the end of the story is idealism hijacked.
Butterworth engages one with the interlocking historical characters wrestling with the moral and practical challenges of effecting change. Their conflicting passions, vanities and altruism are depicted en passant as pawn takes pawn.
There are some interesting illustrations which leave one searching for more.
The subject was alien territory for me so the introduction and prologue seemed heavy going as the author compacted plenty of thought and fact into powerful sentences. Thereafter the sentence structure opened and it was a pleasurable downhill romp until in the final chapter one hits the Bolsheviks and one knows that the end of the story is idealism hijacked.
Butterworth engages one with the interlocking historical characters wrestling with the moral and practical challenges of effecting change. Their conflicting passions, vanities and altruism are depicted en passant as pawn takes pawn.
There are some interesting illustrations which leave one searching for more.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book, which must be the definitive account of the nineteenth century anarchist movement, provides meticulous detail of the events and intrigues of the movement in Europe and North America. The depth of detail and the clarity of analysis make this work a triumph of research and synthesis. Amateur enthusiasts of politics, journalists and all history students will find this a monumental store of insights and disambiguation.
Personally, as general reader I was propelled along through almost dizzying circus of event and characters as a sequence of deceptions, misconceptions and provocations follow one another as agents and their controllers manipulate and incite the hot-headed idealists. But I needed to keep on reading to find out more about just why and how society's utopian initiatives get scuppered from within and without...
At the core of the story are the chiefs of the secret police services such as the Russian Colonel Steiber whose fathomless intrigues spanning decades will never be fully unravelled but there is no doubt that many terrorist outrages and key conspirators were directly connected to him.
Perhaps you will find the overall effect upsetting or depressing as time and time again brave idealists get misled or lose their way or are simply crushed. Is this book a counsel of despair for radicals? Maybe future radicals just need to become way more savvy as to the extent of provocation and duplicity practised by the incumbent powers if things are ever to be changed? Or maybe human nature really is too selfish and base for anti-authoritarian revolution?
Personally, as general reader I was propelled along through almost dizzying circus of event and characters as a sequence of deceptions, misconceptions and provocations follow one another as agents and their controllers manipulate and incite the hot-headed idealists. But I needed to keep on reading to find out more about just why and how society's utopian initiatives get scuppered from within and without...
At the core of the story are the chiefs of the secret police services such as the Russian Colonel Steiber whose fathomless intrigues spanning decades will never be fully unravelled but there is no doubt that many terrorist outrages and key conspirators were directly connected to him.
Perhaps you will find the overall effect upsetting or depressing as time and time again brave idealists get misled or lose their way or are simply crushed. Is this book a counsel of despair for radicals? Maybe future radicals just need to become way more savvy as to the extent of provocation and duplicity practised by the incumbent powers if things are ever to be changed? Or maybe human nature really is too selfish and base for anti-authoritarian revolution?
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Amazing book!
This book is fantastic and disconcerting! It traces the relationships within the radical Left of Europe and USA and between the State and the Left between about 1870 and WWI. Read more
Published 1 month ago by tim
History repeats itself
First of all I'd like to say that all my expectations of this book have come true. It depicts a view of the 1800s and early 1900s that has been overlooked in popular culture for a... Read more
Published 7 months ago by xurde72
Mutual Aid
An exceedingly well-written account of many of the revolutionaries of Europe (and North America, in part) during the late 19thC and early 20thC. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Ian Millard
An excellent book
This effort from Butterworth is quintessential to anyone interested in the Late Victorian Period of London, England and indeed Europe. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Phil Carter
Idealism's tall tales
This book is a marvelous combination of historical research and shaggy dog story. Sometimes it is baffling and murky, but the story, of the anarchist movement from the 1870s on, is... Read more
Published on 27 Mar 2010 by Daniel Williams
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