Life and Ideas gathers excerpts from Malatesta’s writings over a lifetime of revolutionary activity. The editor, Vernon Richards, has translated hundreds of articles by Malatesta, taken from the journals Malatesta either edited himself or contributed to, from the earliest, L’En Dehors of 1892, through to Pensiero e Volontà, which was forced to close by Mussolini’s fascists in 1926, and the bilingual Il Risveglio/Le Réveil, which published most of his writings after that date. These articles have been pruned down to their essentials and collected under subheadings ranging from “Ends and Means” to “Anarchist Propaganda.” Through the selections Malatesta’s classical anarchism emerges: a revolutionary, nonpacifist, nonreformist vision informed by decades of engagement in struggle and study. In addition there is a short biographical piece and an essay by the editor.

Errico Malatesta was an Italian anarchist. He spent much of his life exiled from Italy and more than 10 years in prison. He wrote and edited a number of radical newspapers and was an enormously popular public speaker in his time, regularly speaking to crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. Vernon Richards was an anarchist writer, photographer, editor of the periodical Freedom, and publisher at Freedom Press. Carl Levy is a professor of politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published extensively on anarchism, comparative history, and politics.