London appointment and thanking him for an excellent article. Despite the difficulties and worries that Karl Popper and his wife faced in traveling from New Zealand to England during World War II, including the prospect of meeting new people and the fear that their permits to enter Great Britain would be denied, they finally arrived in England and were greeted by Gombrich and his family. Gombrich gave Popper the first copy of his book "The Open Society and Its Enemies," which Popper eagerly scrutinized on the way to Gombrich's house. Gombrich's "Recollections" end on a reflective note, musing on the immense contributions that Popper made to intellectual discourse in the decades that followed. History after publication The book was not published in Russia until 1992. In 2019, the book was released in audiobook format for the first time, narrated by Liam Gerrard. The audiobook was produced by arrangement with the University of Klagenfurt/Karl Popper Library, by Tantor Media, a division of Recorded Books. Reception and influence Popper's book remains one of the most popular defenses of Western liberal values in the post-World War II era. Gilbert Ryle, reviewing Popper's book just two years after its publication and agreeing with him, wrote that Plato "was Socrates' Judas." The Open Society and Its Enemies was praised by the philosophers Bertrand Russell, who called it "a work of first-class importance" and "a vigorous and profound defence of democracy", and Sidney Hook who called it a "subtly argued and passionately written" critique of the "historicist ideas that threaten the love of freedom [and] the existence of an open society". Hook calls Popper's critique of the cardinal beliefs of historicism "undoubtedly sound", noting that historicism "overlooks the presence of genuine alternatives in history, the operation of plural causal processes in the historical pattern, and the role of human ideals in redetermining the future". Nevertheless, Hook argues that Popper "reads Plato too literally when it serves his purposes and is too cocksure about what Plato's 'real' meaning is when the texts are ambiguous", and calls Popper's treatment of Hegel "downright abusive" and "demonstrably false", noting that "there is not a single reference to Hegel in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf", though neither does Popper refer to Hitler. Some other philosophers were critical. Walter Kaufmann believed that Popper's work has many virtues, including its attack against totalitarianism, and many suggestive ideas. However, he also found it to have