In March 1941, Labour Monthly, the semi-official magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), published an apology for a recent review of The English Revolution, 1640 by the up-and-coming historian Christopher Hill. The reviewer, the German communist Jürgen Kuczynski, had wrongly ‘advanced several incorrect propositions [and] challenged several fundamental Marxist ideas on the subject of the State’. In one graceless sentence, the essential contradiction of Marxist history writing – the unavoidable friction between a rigid party line and the intellectual freedom required for credible scholarship – was brought to the fore. Hill’s canon reflects a lifelong struggle with these incompatible obligations, which, in a rich career, he navigated with suppleness, if not always success.

Michael Braddick’s new book is an ‘intellectual life’ rather than a biography of Hill – ‘an account of one trajectory through the twentieth century on the British left’ – and it ably captures his significance as both an academic and a highly consequential figure in British public life, the populariser par excellence of the 17th century.

Hill was born in York in 1912 to a prosperous solicitor. He was brought up a Methodist, cycling twice every Sunday to chapel. After services, the family would return home to discuss the sermon. Although he ceased being a Christian after going up to Balliol College, Oxford, to study history,