Hardly surprisingly, Anderson's gift for entering into and imaginatively possessing work on widely differing topics is most winningly displayed in his dealings with figures whose writing he admires. The essay here on Robert Brenner's attempt to track the impact of new forms of mercantile capital on English seventeenth-century politics is a prize example, tirelessly analytical without ever being reductive. Yet even in these essays, a certain hauteur or sharpness of reprimand occasionally obtrudes. At one point, he teasingly reproaches Eric Hobsbawm for a weakness for honors and similar emblems of acceptance by the British establishment, but then he adds, as though in partial exculpation of the great man's foible: "In Britain an inability to resist gewgaws is anyway as common among eminent scholars--historians of all stripes foremost among them--as once African agents of the slave trade." At first reading, I did not properly register the offensiveness of this comparison. Is he really saying that the acceptance of knighthoods or (in Hobsbawm's case) the Companion of Honour by contemporary scholars displays a weakness on a par with that of those African intermediaries who sold their compatriots into a life of slavery, suffering and early death? No, one protests, he is simply looking for a telling comparison in the matter of being unable to resist "gewgaws," and the gullibility of African slavers in this matter was once a truism. The allusion is scarcely hobbled by political correctness and may be the more vivid for that. Still, one wonders why Anderson's literary imagination proposed such a gratuitously slighting comparison.

The tonal lapse in this instance may, most charitably, be read as an expression of Anderson's own pride in a kind of outsiderdom, a prickly resistance to any kind of establishment incorporation (a position not impaired by the appointment at UCLA that he has held for some years). "Uncompromising realism" involves standing out against more than one kind of compromise. When in the same essay he cites the older historian's astringent comments on contemporary liberal democracy as indicating "how unassimilable Hobsbawm's work is to any comfortable consensus," he is bestowing his highest praise. When, by contrast, he comments, apropos Hobsbawm's tendency to find silver linings in his otherwise somber account of the triumph of global capitalism, that "a resistance that dispenses with consolations is always stronger than one which relies on them," he is pulling moral rank.

Anderson stands apart in another, more elusive way, too. Although he is without question immersed in the effort to understand the contemporary world--restlessly ranging from China to Peru, searching for causality, registering variety--there is a sense in which he does so in the manner of the great intellectual figures of the nineteenth century. He is essentially a private scholar, not a professional academic; he is at ease in several languages and, by contemporary standards, unimaginably well read in the whole European intellectual and literary tradition; he charts both the evolution of civilizations and the spasms of the zeitgeist with a mixture of command and intimacy; his majestic, long-paced essays would not have been out of place in La Revue des Deux Mondes or the Edinburgh Review in their prime; and whether in discerning the movement of mind in contemporary thought or the movement of capital in the world economy, he habitually operates with an intellectual ambition that is little short of Hegelian.

These qualities make him "untimely," in Nietzsche's sense, for all that his reading and engagement with the world is strenuously à la page (as he might put it). And this is another way in which matters of tone and style start to become revealing indices of self-positioning. At one point in his recollections of historian E.P. Thompson, his former comrade and antagonist, Anderson records that Thompson "chaffed me for impudence about Swift." The slight archaism is perfectly judged, hinting at the school prefect ticking off his fag; the idiom catches his sense of Thompson's seniority, a complicating ingredient in their famous (and famously fierce) exchanges several decades ago. Something similar recurs in his winning essay on the eccentric Italian philologist, political theorist and proofreader Sebastiano Timpanaro, where Anderson rounds out his portrait by saying: "As for questions of character, his categories retained an eighteenth-century ring: his most frequent term of dispraise was mascalzone--'scoundrel.'" One senses the appeal of such a vocabulary to Anderson. In his appreciation of Thompson, he recounts an anecdote in which the older scholar asked a mutual friend what Anderson was up to. The friend mentioned that the latter was writing a piece on conservative thinkers (reproduced as the first chapter of the present collection), to which Thompson retorted: "Yes, I know. Oakeshott was a scoundrel. Tell him to stiffen his tone."

For all his pessimism about the course of recent history, Anderson has retained his conviction that scoundrels should not be allowed to get away without a good thrashing. This too, he implies, should be a matter of honor on the left, and so, in keeping with this aristocratic code, a number of those who have given offense are "called out," challenged to a dialectical duel, theories at twenty paces. Anderson gives them both barrels; this collection resembles the reading room of a club, temporarily turned into a field hospital, the mortally wounded gasping in every armchair. Some of these unfortunates are fellow stylists, and there are occasional moments in Anderson's prose that suggest he may be tempted to shoot in the air, honor satisfied. But then some inner ancestral voice barks at him with military-gentry gruffness: "Stiffen yer tone, Anderson." And by God, sir, he has.

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