Italian Triangulations: R.G. Collingwood and his Italian Colleagues. Review of Rik Peters, History as Thought and Action: The Philosophies of Croce, Gentile, de Ruggiero and Collingwood (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2013).

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This book is both welcome and timely. I should say at the outset that it is a magnificent piece of scholarship, well worth reading by anyone with any degree of serious interest in the Italian neo-Idealists and Collingwood. I don’t mean, of course that it is blemish-free or that one cannot disagree with parts of it; but I do mean that I know of nothing comparable which systematically draws together the thought of these thinkers and considers them in their mutual relations.¹ This book has been needed for decades. Following its publication, commentators on Collingwood and the Italian idealists no longer have any excuse for ignorance concerning the intellectual relationship between the thinkers it discusses.