Anonymous Comrade writes:

Historian Christopher Hill dies at 91

Martin Kettle, Tuesday February 25, 2003, The Guardian

Christopher Hill, the Oxford historian whose Marxist interpretations of the 17th century helped to revolutionise the way in which generations of scholars and students saw the English civil war and the era of Oliver Cromwell, has died.

Family members said that Mr Hill, who had suffered for some years from Alzheimer's disease, died peacefully in Oxfordshire yesterday at the age of 91.

The man whom the late EP Thompson once described as "the dean and paragon of English historians" reached the height of his fame and influence in the 1960s, when he was elected master of Balliol College, Oxford, a post he held from 1965 to 1978.

Yet at the same time as he held one of the most prestigious posts in the educational establishment, Mr Hill was also publishing immensely influential radical history books celebrating the previously largely forgotten world of the Levellers and Diggers during the English revolution. One of his best known books, The World Turned Upside Down, was adapted as a play by the National Theatre, a rare accolade for a work of academic history.

As the author of a series of books on 17th century England published between 1940 and 1996, Mr Hill defined the way in which successive generations rediscovered the upheavals of perhaps the most turbulent era in the country's political history. His textbook The Century of Revolution became a standard work for many years and in the 60s and 70s, Mr Hill's name was prac tically synonymous with his own period of study. Even when his approach fell out of fashion, the next generation of revisionist historians defined themselves in opposition to his ideas.

Born in York in 1912, the son of Methodists, Mr Hill spent his student years and most of his working life at Balliol, where he won every academic prize and distinction imaginable. But he was always more famous, and in some quarters notorious, for his Marxist approach to his subject, from which he never significantly deviated for over half a century.

Mr Hill was a member of the Communist party from the 30s until 1957, when he resigned in protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and against the British party's lack of internal democracy. Before that, though, he was one of the brightest stars of the constellation of writers who made up the Communist Party Historians Group, which also included Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé and Rodney Hilton. Mr Hill said he always regarded the historians' group as "the greatest single influence" on his work.

Mr Hill's earliest book, The English Revolution, was written in 1940 and has only rarely been out of print since. Among his later books were the bestselling biography of Cromwell, God's Englishman, published in 1970, and studies of Milton, the Bible and Bunyan. His 1984 volume The Experience of Defeat, a study of the Restoration, was made especially piquant by the political reverses which the radical left was experiencing at that time in his own lifetime.