Peter Marshall

Image rights: PM Press

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism formats: epub mobi published: 12/2009 pages: 840 price: 16.50 euros

Peter Marshall is a philosopher, historian, biographer, travel writer and poet. He has written fifteen highly acclaimed books which are being translated into fourteen different languages. His circumnavigation of Africa was made into a 6-part TV series and his voyage around Ireland into a BBC Radio series. He has written articles and reviews for many national newspapers and journals.Widely recognized as a bold and original thinker, Marshall has made a major contribution to fields as diverse as anarchism, ecology, alchemy and archaeology. He has been hailed by Resurgence magazine as one of the twenty five ’visionary voices’ who have helped shape the new world view in the last quarter of a century. In his life and writings, he has tried to expand freedom and to help all beings realize their full potential.

Born on 23 August 1946 in Bognor Regis, England, a stone’s throw from the sea, Peter Hugh Marshall became a boarder at Steyning Grammar School in the Sussex Downs. He then sailed around the world as a purser cadet in the P & O-Orient Shipping Company before teaching English in Senegal, West Africa.

He returned to England to take a B.A.degree in English, French and Spanish from London University and an M.A. and a D.Phil. in the History of Ideas from Sussex University. He has taught philosophy and literature at several British universities and art schools.

In the 1970s Marshall was a founding member of a libertarian community in Buckinghamshire called Redfield. He went in 1980 with Jenny Zobel to Snowdonia in North Wales for a winter to finish his first book and stayed on for 21 years, first living in a remote cottage in the mountains and then down by the sea. He now lives on an organic smallholding in Devon with Elizabeth Ashton Hill. Apart from writing and growing fruit and vegetables, his great passion is sailing. He has two children, Emily and Dylan.

Marshall has been chairman of the Toussaint L’Ouverture Theatre Company and a trustee of the Tree Shepherds. He is now a member of the Society of Authors and an elected fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.