E.P. Thompson

E.P. Thompson author of The Making of the English Working Class, was responsible for the recent study Star Wars. A collection of poems, Infant and Emperor, was published in 1983. ‘Powers and Names’ is in part prompted by Szuma Chien’s Records of the Historian (91 BC), selections from which have been translated by Yan Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang for the Foreign Languages Press, Beijing.

Letter

Wordsworth’s Crisis

8 December 1988

No, there wasn’t ‘a very considerable Cambridge element’ leading the London Corresponding Society. This is clear from the Society’s minutes and papers. Nicholas Roe (Letters, 16 February) has found his Cambridge alumni on an ad hoc committee which was set up to raise funds for the victims of the Treason Trials. Probably William Frend, who was certainly a warm supporter of the LCS, helped to...
Letter

On the rant

9 July 1987

SIR: My review of Fear, Myth and History (LRB, 9 July) was not a political polemic but a defence of history against ideology. Ninety-five per cent of the review – which neither Davis nor Scott (Letters, 17 September) address – concerned substantive questions of the Ranters and of the antinomian tradition; 5 per cent of rhetorical political ornaments provoked by J.C. Davis’s own leaden polemics...
Letter

Seconds Away

8 January 1987

SIR: Why does Wayland Kennet (Letters, 19 March) continue to write about END and Eastern Europe, when he clearly hasn’t bothered to find out? END has had several years of close and continuing dialogue with Charter 77, Polish ‘Peace and Freedom’ and many other groups. Of course END is ‘unilateralist’ in the sense of CND’s founding policies (see Sheila Jones – Letters, 2 April); at the...

Convenient Death of a Hero

Arnold Rattenbury, 8 May 1997

E.P. Thompson, historian and peacemaker, known as Edward to his friends, died at his home near Worcester in 1993. Four years on, Beyond the Frontier is a volume of material set aside far earlier....

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Bankura’s Englishman

Amit Chaudhuri, 23 September 1993

Two Englishmen spring to mind in connection with Tagore: C.F. Andrews and W.W. Pearson. Andrews, with his further association with Gandhi, looms now and then in Indian history books and national...

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John Homer’s Odyssey

Claude Rawson, 9 January 1992

Edward Thompson’s Customs in Common is described as a ‘companion volume’ to his The Making of the English Working Class, and rises to the occasion. It has the wide range of...

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Final Jam

Michael Irwin, 2 June 1988

It isn’t easy to describe this Protean work, but the 18th-century flavour of the title page offers a useful preliminary hint. Essentially the story is an inversion of Gulliver’s...

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Total Solutions

Alan Brinkley, 18 July 1985

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...

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The End of the Future

Jeff McMahan, 1 July 1982

The Reagan Administration’s bellicose posturing and its apparent relish for the Cold War have finally succeeded in rousing Americans to an awareness of the danger of nuclear war. But, while...

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Counting weapons

Rudolf Peierls, 5 March 1981

Nuclear weapons, and the knowledge of the horrors they are capable of producing, have been with us for 35 years. We might be tempted to let familiarity blunt the impact of these facts on our...

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English Marxists in dispute

Roy Porter, 17 July 1980

The Englishness of English historians lies in their eclecticism. Few would admit to being unswerving Marxists, Freudians, Structuralists, Cliometricians, Namierites, or even Whigs. Most believe...

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