This book, first published in 1984, contains the principal papers from a distinguished colloquium held in his honour in 1982. Its avowed purpose was to investigate further the notion of totalitarian democracy that Talmon brought to the fore in his influential first book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1951), and to look at its repercussions in the contemporary world.

Contributors to this volume explore the relationships between fundamentalist religious belief, political extremism and outbreaks of religiously inspired violence. Is the post-Cold War world increasingly violent and is this violence the result of increasingly strident religious understandings of how societies should be organised? The contributors to this volume do not always agree on the answers to these questions. But they do agreee the questions themselves are among the most important to be posed in the early years of the 21st century.

Is there a Western world leader whose reputation has not been re-analysed and reassessed, usually to his or her detriment? With this question, Harold Shukman introduces Redefining Stalinism, a collection of articles published 50 years after Stalin's death. With the opening of Soviet archives to an unprecedented degree since the demise of the USSR, totalitarian and revisionist arguments about Stalin and the Stalinist system can be more closely explored. Topics range from a survey of recent Western views of Stalin's Russia, to an account of Stalin's approach to intelligence, two separate...