Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

Autobiographie (Vienna, 1992), p. 158.

10. Fritz Klein, Drinnen und Draussen: Ein Historiker in der D D R Erinnerungen (Frankfurt-am-Main, 2000), pp. 169–213.

11. Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, 1997), p. 20.

12. Ibid., pp. 128–9.

10. War

1. Ian Kershaw, Hitler (London, 2001), vol. II, p. 302.

2. Ibid., p. 298.

3. Theodor Prager, Zwischen London und Moskaw: Bekenntnisse eines Revisionisten (Vienna, 1975), p. 59.

4. Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Cambridge, MA, 1972), p. 55.

11. Cold War

1. Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (London, 2002), chapter 1.

2. In any case, if any such problem impinged on British immediately, it was not Soviet but American behaviour, namely the ruthless terms on which Washington made dependent the grant of its 1946 loan to Britain. (See R. Skidelsky, Keynes, vol. III.

3. It included Bernard Floud, who was later hounded into suicide as a suspected spy or recruiter of Soviet spies by the security services. (He was found dead by his son, Roderick Floud, an economic historian who later became my colleague at Birkbeck, and is now head of the London Guildhall University.) Ironically, as he told me, the CP functionary David Springhall had once tried to recruit him as an agent, and he had told him he had no authority to do so. In any case it is unlikely that a man who attended Party branch meeting after the war was engaged in the kind of activity which usually implied breaking contact with the Party.

4. On the day in August 1947 I went there I estimated the number of travellers to the ’green frontier’ at c. 500, of travellers back at c. 7–800. There were then three trains a day.

5. The words of a British prisoner of war, escaped from a camp in Poland, who fought his way back with the advancing Red Army. I owe citation to George Barnsby of Wolverhampton.

6. Professor Reinhard Koselleck.

7. See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extrems ( paperback), p. 189.

8. Its title For a Lasting Peace and o People’s Democracy [sic] was usually shortened to ’Forfor’. It disappeared from sight in 1956.

9. R. W. Johnson, ’Do they eat people here much still? Rarement, Tres rarement’, London Review of Books, 14 december 2000, pp. 30–31. Hodgkin, whose heart was in the Third World, abandoned the delegacy during his travels in Africa, whither he had gone to extend its work. he returned to Oxford in the 1960s as a Fellow of Balliol College, which also elected the dean of Marxist historians, Christopher Hil, as Master. His widow, the Nobel Laureate (Chemistry) Dorothy Hodgkin, continued the family tradition, for in 1984 I found myself with her on a visit of solidarity to Bir Zeit University, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of Palestine.

10. ’Academic Freedom’ in University Newsletter, Cambridge, November 1953, p. 2. I edited and wrote most of the ten issues of this Nesletter, ’published on behalf of a group of Communist graduates by the Cambridge Communist Party’ (i.e. the Graduate branch of the CP) which appeared between October 1951 and November 1954.

11. I am grateful to Nina Fishman for the relevant documents from the BBC archives, Controller, Talks to D.S.W., 20 September 1950 and G.22/48 circulated on 13 March 1948, THE TREATMENT OF COMMUNISM AND COMMUNIST SPEAKERS, NOTE BY THE DIRECTOR OF THE SPOKEN WORD. The director appears to have regarded the famous physicist, later Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society, P. Blackett, as a communist, presumably because of this hostility to nuclear warfare.

12. The guinea, a notional currency unit of ?1 is, was a convenient way for shopkeepers to charge more. It disappeared with the decimalization of the currency.

13.W. C. Lubrenow, The Cambridge Apostles 1820–1914; Imagination and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge, 1998).

14. Alan Ryan, ’The Voice from the Hearth-Rug’, London Review of Books , 28 October 1999, p. 19.

15. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Historiches Denken am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (1945–2000) (Gottingen, 2001) pp.29–30.

16. Robert Conquest’s pionering The Great Terror was not published until 1968.

17. See Hennessy, op. cit., p. 30.

12. Stalin and After

1. Ken Coates, ’How not to Reappraise the New Left’ in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds), The Socialist Register (Merlin Press, London, 1976), p. 112.

2. Thus in the rules of the British CP the right of members to take part in the ’formation of policy’ had been changed into the mere right to its ’discussion’.

3. Aldo Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti (Milan, 1996); Felix Tchouev, Conversations avec Molotov; 140 Entretiens avec le Bras Droit de Staline (Paris, 1995); Robert Levy, Anna Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley, 2000); K. Morgan, Harry Pollit (Manchester, 1993).

4. Letter from E.J. Hobsbawm, World News, 26 January 1957, p. 62.

5. See Eric Hobsbawm, ’The Historians’ Group of the communist Party’ in M. Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A. L, Morton (London, 1978), p. 42.