Perry Anderson’s book Brazil Apart covers half a century in the life of Brazilian politics, from the military regime of the 1960s to the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, with the long rule of the Workers’ Party (PT) sandwiched in between. Some of the essays it contains, first published in the London Review of Books, have already generated fierce political controversy before their appearance in book form.

The former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso was so infuriated by Anderson’s critique in 2016 of his record that he penned an angry letter to the LRB, referring to the author as “someone who has known me for more than fifty years,” whose essay unfortunately “suffers from his strong ideological bias.” Anderson’s response was contemptuous: “[Cardoso’s] applause for the charade of 17 April” — when the Brazilian Congress voted to impeach Dilma Rousseff on trumped-up charges — “will be a lasting stain on his reputation.”

It’s not surprising that Brazil Apart has divided reviewers. In the Financial Times, Geoff Dyer scolded Anderson for his “doctrinaire bashing of neoliberalism” and an alleged failure to appreciate that “statism” was the root of Brazil’s economic malaise: Lula and the PT should have kept to the wise path sketched out by Cardoso, according to Dyer. In contrast, a Brazilian academic, Marcelo Hoffman, praised the book, not least for its “altogether devastating critique of the rule of the PT” — a critique stemming from the Left, not the FT’s neoliberal right.