Christopher Hill was one of 20th-century Britain’s finest historians, producing a slate of still influential books, from 1961’s The Century of Revolution to The World Turned Upside Down in 1972. He was also an unrepentant communist, a member of the party from his student days until 1957, when he left in disgust at the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
These two facts are, of course, not unconnected since Hill’s work drew brilliantly on Marxist theories of culture, politics and class in understanding the dynamics of Cromwellian England. This new biography represents a strong synthesis of his life and ideas.
From an affluent Methodist family in Yorkshire, Hill had rejected religion by his teenage years as part of a general search for cultural, political and personal authenticity that author Michael Braddick identifies as the key to understanding him. He retained a respect for religion – evident across his published works – as well as a kind of Christian egalitarianism that informed his everyday life.
A brilliant pupil, Hill was personally recruited as a history student for Balliol College in 1931. With a few small exceptions along the way, his entire professional life remained at Oxford. And it was there, during his undergraduate studies, that he gained the two dominant strands of his life: a dedication to Marxism and a fascination with the 17th century.
A deeply private person, Hill poses a particular problem for his biographer. Braddick, though, is helped by the fact that for most of his professional life Hill was the subject of extensive state surveillance; much of his movements, political connections and even romantic entanglements being duly recorded by agents of the British state. In turn, Braddick uses this extensive intelligence archive (now declassified) to narrate an intriguing story that moves from wartime service, through membership in the “Historians Group” of the British Communist Party alongside other such figures as Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson, to Hill’s later tenure as Master of Balliol College. That was an incongruously elite high point in the career of a communist and Hill retained an odd loyalty to Balliol College and its fusty traditions.
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Certainly, this is a sometimes dry book; the ins and outs of academic administration will not captivate everyone to the same degree. Nonetheless, Braddick has produced a sensitive and careful account of Hill’s political developments across the 20th century.
He raises important questions about how and why this Marxist historian fell out of favour during the culture wars of Thatcherite Britain and in the end has produced a welcome portrait of a still towering figure in British intellectual life.
