For a quarter of a century, Professor and Mrs Manuel have explored the highways and byways of Utopianism. Their task is now completed, their painstaking research encapsulated in a single monumental volume. Nothing less than 'monumental' will suffice to describe it: half a million words, at a rough estimate. Tighter editing would have excised an occasional sentence as repetitious or otiose. But that would have had no more substantial effect than a craftsman's final polishing. The monolith remains, in a sense beyond criticism, simply there, an Ayer's Rock of scholarship.

LRB 6 March 1980 | PDF Download