Edmund Wilson: To The Finland Station [2004] paperback

From the ideas of the early nineteenth-century socialists to the thoughts of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, Edmund Wilson traces the development of the political and intellectual movements that culminated in the Russian Revolution. TO THE FINLAND STATION is a work of history on a grand scale, at once sweeping and detailed, closely reasoned and passionately argued, that succeeds in painting an unforgettable picture - alive with conspirators and philosophers, utopians and nihilists - of the making of the modern world. 'The first thing that strikes us about To the Finland Station is the vastness of its scope'It is easily, equally at home in the philosopher's study, in the prisoner's cell, on the steppes, in the streets, melancholy in great country houses, choking in fetid industrial slums'It can remind us that our history is alive and open and rich with excitement and promise' New York Times Book Review