Writing by Candlelight

by E.P. Thompson

Writing by Candlelight

Genres: History, Essays

287 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Edward Palmer Thompson was an English historian, writer, marxist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry.

Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a "historian in the Marxist tradition," calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists' "confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives". Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and during the 1980s, he was the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.

Reviews

[Horza]

A collection of essays loosely focused around the British establisment and the deep state, opening at the beginning of the New Left in the early 1960s and finishing in a white hot rage with a series of excoriating pieces on state secrecy, judicial misconduct and the early 80s Cold War escalation. Background reading on the UK's 1970s industrial confrontations and the Blair Peach and ABC cases won't go astray here.