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“... utopianism, and thereby terminate a distracting strain of political theory, he clearly failed. As Gregory Claeys shows in his collection of Utopias of the British Enlightenment, the genre of the ideal commonwealth was alive and well in Whig Britain from before the Augustan age to well beyond the French Revolution. This is in its own way a revelation, for ...”

“... of our incurable straightness. Utopias from the 18th and early 19th-centuries, of the kind which Gregory Claeys has assembled in this handsome set of volumes, are outlandish precisely because of their ordinariness. What seems ‘utopian’, in the sense of extravagantly unreal, about them is precisely their incapacity to imagine a world significantly ...”

“... army of noisy demagogues. The ‘soldiers of literature’, as he called them, were on the march. Gregory Claeys’s edition of a hundred or so Chartist tracts, lectures and pamphlets easily surpasses in size (and in price) the principal older collections edited by F.C. Mather and Edward Royle, although for the hardy there remains a less easily available ...”