BOOK REVIEW / Paperbacks: Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism - Peter Marshall: Fontana, pounds 9.99

Bombers, rioters, ruffians, thugs: as the caricatures show, anarchists have had a bad press. This sober but passionately biased book seeks to dignify anarchy through flattering definition and analogy, by rounding up supporters and well-wishers (Gandhi, Godwin, Proudhon), but above all by showing how its intellectual sources go back beyond the 19th century to ancient China, the Renaissance and Enlightenment.