About ten years ago, I heard Edward Thompson give a public lecture at Harvard University. He was not then an internationally renowned spokesman for the peace movement: there was at that point no peace movement of any consequence to be a spokesman for. He was, however, one of the most influential historians of his time. Thompson was speaking in one of the university's largest lecture halls, and the room was full to overflowing. People were sitting on the floor, standing against the walls, spilling out of the doors into the corridors. Unlike audiences at many academic lectures, the men and women who had come to this one were overwhelmingly young. Many were graduate students (in history and other social sciences) for whom Thompson's scholarship - above all, his great book The Making of the English Working Class - had been an intellectual inspiration. But many were also people in some way affected by the anti-war movement and the other upheavals of the Sixties; and for them, his work was also a political inspiration.

LRB 18 July 1985 | PDF Download