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The bitter oppositions of Thai politics can seem strangely lacking in ideological substance. How might they be explained? In one of his last lectures, Benedict Anderson considers a crucial but overlooked factor: divisions within the country’s Sino-Thai communities. Benedict Anderson's first published essay, 'Malaysia and Indonesia', appeared in NLR I/28 in 1964 under the nom de guerre Robert Curtis, for obvious political reasons. With this number we publish one of his last, a highly original explanation of the unprecedented strife in Thailand between the 'Yellows' of the Palace-Army nexus and the 'Reds' aligned behind former PM Thaksin and his family. Born in 1936 in China, brought up in California and southern Ireland, educated at Cambridge and Cornell, he would win widest recognition for Imagined Communities (1983), a reflection 'on the origin and spread of nationalism'. A Southeast Asia scholar-Java in a Time of Revolution (1972) was a major early work-Ben was characteristically modest in presenting the book, with its 'would-be-global pretensions'; it soon became a classic, a critical reference point for all further work in the field. Readers of NLR will be aware of the exceptional reach of Ben's interests and the undullable curiosity with which he pursued them, across borders both territorial and linguistic, in studies of states and literatures, political movements and cultural institutions. Suharto's New Order and dispositions of the post-Communist left in Indonesia and Thailand; nationalisms East and West; the networks linking American and Spanish anarchists with the anti-colonial revolution in Southeast Asia; an explosive global vision of the late nineteenth century in the novels of the Filipino Jos... Rizal; the soft geopolitics of the Nobel Prize for Literature-just a sample of the work that has appeared under his signature in the Review. To this should be added the account of the September 1965 massacre in Indonesia, one of the 20th century's most extreme episodes of counter-revolutionary violence (NLR I/36): redacted for NLR by Peter Wollen, under his pseudonym Lucien Rey, this dossier was a world first, based on the confidential 'Cornell Paper' co-written by Ben and his colleague Ruth McVey. Indonesia was a home to him and a focus for his anti-imperialist politics-he became, he said, an Indonesian nationalist of sorts; it would have been politically impossible to publish it under his name. Banned in any case, as one of the Suharto regime's most uncompromising critics, Anderson diverted his energies elsewhere in Southeast Asia, notably to Thailand and the Philippines. A return, in honour, to Indonesia came in the end-he died peacefully on 13 December last in Java, in whose sea his ashes were scattered. But Bangkok was where he lived in the last phase of his life, and Thailand became a primary focus of his research and critical engagement, in essays and lectures such as the one that follows-published in memory of a scholar whose modesty was as great as his erudition, a passionate intellectual of the left whose next book was to have been written in Indonesian, and a man with a rare gift for friendship.