Neal Ascherson

To the end of his life, Claud Cockburn stuck to two core beliefs. The first was his instinctive scepticism and cynicism about all who hold authority. But it was his second core belief that really drove his journalism, that ‘decision-makers were weaker, more incompetent, more divided, more self-destructively corrupt than they liked people to understand and hence more vulnerable to journalistic attack and exposure.’

Myopic and flattering as their take on empire history has been, the Brits never drugged themselves into supposing that the millions out there loved them and longed to be British. Perhaps this was because ‘our empire’ was presented as a glowing abstraction, floating above the tangible reality of one’s own country.

It would be decades before younger Germans emerged from the national solipsism of their parents and recognised the suffering wreaked by German fascism on other peoples. When they did so, not least through moral repugnance at the creation of the West German army and through the appearance of active ‘atonement’ movements, the way opened to wider empathies. ‘By the 1990s, German responsibility for the Holocaust had become a civil religion that defined national identity.’

The revolution was significantly different in each country it visited. The fearsome events unfolding in Vienna can’t be understood without taking into account the simultaneous eruptions in Hungary. The explosion in Berlin was touched off by news of the February Revolution in Paris, but took a quite different course.

Unlike Althusser’s, Tom Nairn’s Marxism would grow almost unrecognisably open and eclectic. Many on the left never forgave him for writing that ‘the theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure,’ or for his insistence that globalisation had liberating, progressive aspects. But many on the right, including Britain’s intelligence services and their clients, never forgave him either – for spreading seditious doctrines threatening to the kingdom.