I found the book to be boring. I had hoped to get a better insight into what drives today's anarchists by reading about the motivations of the pre-WW I anarchists but this book explained far too little about the "whys" and just talked about who was moving where. A better book on Anarchists is "the President and the Assassin." ( )

Alex Butterworth has put a huge amount of work into this, essentially a history of anarchism and its off shoots from the Paris Commune to the First World War. In parallel he traces the shadowy world of spies, provocateurs, agents, double agents and triple agents and general betrayal fermented by the Okhrana in particular. Despite the title, this is not a world that never was - it was a world that very much existed and there were plenty of corpses to prove it.

Its a fascinating period - the birth of modern surveillance and manipulation techniques, the birth of terrorism as individualist anarchists adopted "propaganda by deed" - largely bombing outrages and assassinations, and the repressive responses of the governments of France, Russia, Italy and Spain (with Britain taking a much more tolerant attitude). Readers will be particularly struck by some of the parallels with today; young men burning with passionate idealism, with little to lose, manipulated into violence and seemingly content to die. The panicky response of government will be familiar too

Butterworth is good on the main characters; the ubiquitous Louise Michel, the saintly Kropotkin, the shadowy Rachovsky, the tireless Malatesta. But a stream of other characters weave in and out of the narrative sometimes with a gap of 100 pages - by which time you've forgotten who they are. Yes, there is a list of Dramatis Personae to help with this, but its still confusing. As for the world of secret agents - well, Butterworth has done well to achieve the clarity that he has given the lack of documentation of much of this, but I defy any reader to make sense of the actions of the agent variously known as Hekkelman, Landesman and Harting and especially those of Evno Azef .

Some events are handled well. The rise of the Commune, the subsequent deportation to New Caledonia of the survivors, the development of revolutionary emigre society in London, the rise of violent anarchism in the early 1890s. But in general the scope is just too broad to keep track of a lot of the threads that Butterworth spins out but doesn't really tie back together

Very worthy, and a mighty effort of research, but only about 70% successful I'd say ( )

A rambling incoherent mess. ( )

Butterworth chose a great time for this work (roughly, Kropotkin's active years), and there's a fabulous story to be told about it, but this book isn't quite it. On the upside, his research is mind-boggling, and my life is substantially richer now that I know about the fabulous Gabriel Jogan-Pages, aka Leo Taxil, who, e.g., managed to convince the military governor of Marseilles to hunt down an imaginary school of killer sharks, and convinced much of the world that the Freemasons worshiped devils and sacrificed human beings. The general thrust of the book is to show how many wonderful characters emerged from the 1871 Commune, or from interactions with communards on the one hand, and, on the other, how anti-terrorist bodies fairly quickly turned into terrorist bodies all in the interests of catching terrorists. That's all reasonable.

Unfortunately, there are far too many kettles on the stove-top; Butterworth, like many non-professional historians, is more concerned with cramming more stuff in than selecting the most relevant bits and pieces, and, still worse, his prose style is very, very, very poorly suited to a story involving dozens of people flung across the globe. It's entirely up to the reader to work out which events were the important ones, which sounds wonderful, but is actually like trying to choose a good meal from a menu on which there's only names and no description of the food. It's just impossible.

Five stars for the choice of topic and the asides and digressions; two stars for the execution. Well worth reading, though you might need to skim sections. Or even whole chapters.*

*: please, please, please, historians, give your chapters real names so your reader knows what the topic is before they get half way through. No more clever quotes as chapter titles, I beg you. ( )

Lots of great information, context, and stories here. I wasn't reading for academic reasons though, so I had to develop a way to skim past some of the overwhelming detail. I never gave up though and I learned a lot for it. Would recommend if you're really interested in the subject. ( )