The World That Never Was

The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents by Alex Butterworth

"Woven into the book's backdrop are the lives of some of the notable late-19th-century European revolutionaries radicalised by poverty, injustice, tsarist tyranny and the bloody suppression of the Paris commune of 1871. These were men and women who believed, in William Morris's words, that "No man is good enough to be another man's master", and who shared a vision of the world as it might one day be – a cooperative commonwealth rid of exploitation, oppression and conflict.
The main story, however, is of the penetration of these groups of often naive utopians by the sinister functionaries of the secret state whose job it was to protect the status quo: the policemen and spymasters who lurked in the shadows seeding uncertainty and dissent, cultivating tensions, beguiling with deceits, and luring credulous and impressionable idealists into committing crimes they may never have otherwise conceived."

Bron: The Guardian, Saturday 27 March 2010, Stuart Christie