Twenty-one essays written between 1957 and 2011 for New Left Review, Marxism Today and comparable outlets, arranged in three parts with an editorial introduction and an afterword. The connecting method is conjunctural analysis, which Hall developed from Lenin by way of Althusser and Gramsci: a political moment is made when dissimilar currents and contrary strivings fuse, so contradictions moving at different tempos have to be read together. Part one covers the first New Left, the argument about classlessness, the Cuban missile crisis and political commitment. Part two gathers the Thatcherism pieces, where the swing to the right appears as an authoritarian populism built from law and order campaigns, race and popular consent rather than as a reflex of recession. Part three carries the analysis into New Labour's double shuffle and, in 2011, into a neoliberal revolution that survived the banking crash. Editorial notes identify the political figures Hall assumed his readers knew.