Overview

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. The last years of the nineteenth century saw the birth of a new phenomenon- international terrorism. Bombings and assassinations shook the great cities of Europe and America, threatening social order. Fiendish networks of anarchist conspiritors were blamed and the public whipped into a frenzy of anxiety. The reality was rather different. These dramatic events were only the most visible part of a longer, clandestine struggle waged between the forces of revolution and reaction, in which little was as it seemed. Alex Butterworth interweaves group biography, cultural history and meticulous detective work to create a revelatory account of the age. Both intimate and panoramic, it is a story with uncanny resonances for today.

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9780099551928

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Reviews

Exhilarating... almost any paragraph packs more action than an entire Dan Brown novel Financial Times Intriguing, provocative and written with a novelist's eye for detail, this book is an engrossing journey into a murky, subterranean world. -- Mike Rapport BBC History Magazine Butterworth has created an impressive work which will captivate those unfamiliar with anarchist history and teach even specialists much that they did not know before Independent Compelling and insightful... The World That Never Was is a compelling narrative history both of a generation of demonised and battered - but optimistic - revolutionaries...and of the political police forces ranged against them -- Stuart Christie Guardian 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

Author Information

Born in 1969, Alex Butterworth is an historian, writer and dramatist whose first book Pompeii- The Living City won the Longmans-History Today New Generation Book of the Year. He lives in Oxford.

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