Miles Taylor writes:

Today, as capitalism stumbles, Marx is back as a prophet for our troubled times. Engels, however, has remained on the shelf. Is the moment ripe for a reunion? Tristram Hunt clearly thinks so. He has restored colour, lights and action to Engels’s life much as Francis Wheen did in his makeover of Marx ten years ago. The Frock-Coated Communist is highly readable and mostly reliable. Engels’s previous biographers – principally Gustav Mayer (who knew his contemporaries) and Terrell Carver – were unable to separate him out from the history of Marxism and the politics of the International Workingmen’s Association. Hunt liberates his subject from the prehistory of Communism. He gives us an absorbing narrative of the life, writings and affairs of a good-hearted bon viveur, perpetually caught between the piety and propriety of his upbringing, and the edgy excitement of the 19th-century metropolis.

(LRB 17 December 2009)

Penguin Books Ltd | Paperback 480 pp. |ISBN: 9780141021409