Letter: Geography and anarchism

The geographer, conservationist and coral atoll expert David Stoddart held anarchist beliefs. He also rediscovered the work, published in the second half of the 19th century, of an earlier geographer with an anarchist outlook, the Frenchman Elisée Reclus.

In the geography department at Cambridge University, Stoddart was a larger than life character. However, it was a running joke among undergraduates that we saw less of him than of other members of staff because of his idyllic-sounding research areas of distant tropical islands.