"Sidelights"

British writer Peter Marshall is noted for his biography of the radical eighteenth-century British philosopher William Godwin. Marshall's strong desire to keep the ideas of England's more famous political theorists accessible to the public has also prompted him to edit several works, including Godwin's Damon and Delia and The Anarchist Writings of William Godwin, for the modern reader.

Marshall's biographical portrait of Godwin recounts events in the philosopher's life and provides a detailed summary of all work published by Godwin over the course of his political career. William Godwin includes detailed explications of Godwin's more notable novels and of Godwin's biography of British poet and author Geoffrey Chaucer. In addition, Marshall provides his readers with an examination of Godwin's most significant philosophical work, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Although finding Marshall's biography somewhat excessive in its thoroughness, New York Times Book Review contributor David Bromwich maintained that William Godwin "is interesting. It brings back a thinker who was at once visionary and confident, and who had the good fortune to write when utopian ideas did not seem utopian."

More recently, Marshall has broadened his study to include not only Godwin but other radical political theorists. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, published in 1991, includes Godwin's vision of an anarchist society as one of many political theories by such members of the anarchist school as Mikhail Bakunin, Gabriel de Foigny, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Ayn Rand. The volume was praised by reviewers for the breadth of its study and Marshall's scholarly approach. James Joll, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, noted that "Peter Marshall's wide survey comes at the right moment when so many other ideologies have collapsed, and his concluding discussion of anarchism in relation to world ecological problems ... suggests that, for all its past failures, anarchism in some form or another still provides suggestions as to how a different and better society might be organized."

Marshall turns his attention to a history of the environmental movement with his book Nature's Web: Rethinking Our Place on Earth. Focusing on the intellectual roots of the movement,...