The Essential E.P. Thompson, edited by Dorothy Thompson. New Press: New York, 2001. x + 498 pp. $45.00 cloth; $21.95 paper.

Abstract

E.P. Thompson was nursed on a mother's milk of transatlantic missionary work and writings on the Middle East that reached back to the last half of the nineteenth century. Fathered on Bengali literature, the poetry of the Great War, cricket with the likes of Nehru, and the struggle for Indian independence, Thompson was born into a highly literate and deeply politicized global village. Small wonder that at seventeen he was an anti-fascist and a soldier. But he took a wide Left turn, following in a brother's footsteps, to become a Marxist and a Communist in his twenties, only to find himself, by 1956, donning dissident dress, leading an exodus from the Communist Party of Great Britain, building a revolutionary New Left in the seemingly unpropitious climate of the late 1950s.