Anarchism is a social and political ideology which, despite a history of defeat, continually reemerges in a new guise or in a new country, so that another chapter has to be added to its chronology, or another dimension to its scope.

In 1962 George Woodcock wrote a 470-page book, Anarchism, which, continually reprinted as a Penguin Book and translated into many languages, became probably the most widely read book on the subject in the world. Woodcock wrote a series of updating postscripts until his death in 1995.

In 1992 Peter Marshall wrote a book of more than 700 pages called Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (HarperCollins) which seems likely to overtake the earlier book in global sales. Woodcock was greatly relieved: ‘I now have a book,’ he wrote, ‘to which I can direct readers when they ask me how soon I intend to bring my Anarchism up to date.’ Like all his other readers, I have been very grateful for Peter Marshall’s capacity for summarizing complex ideas and for exploring the by-ways of anarchist history.

For decades, when in search of a fact or an opinion, I would telephone Nicolas Walter, who died in the year 2000. I greatly value his neat little pamphlet About Anarchism, which is part of the global treasury of anarchist literature stocked by the Freedom Press Bookshop in London.

My task has been one of selection: simply an attempt to introduce the reader to anarchist ideas in a very few words and to point to further sources. In this rich field the emphases are bound to be my own.