From Plato to H.G. Wells, from Cloud Cuckoo Land to Shangri-La, the utopian impulse has generated a vast body of work—including philosophy and political theory, classical literature and science fiction—as visionaries have sought to create a blueprint of the ideal society. And yet these utopian dreams have often turned to nightmares. Here the author of Occult London takes us on a journey through these imaginary worlds, charting the progress of utopian ideas from their classical origins to the emergence of socialist and feminist ideas, and the 20th-century rise of dystopian expressions of totalitarian oppression.