PAST AND PRESENT

In issue No. so (February 1971) we published a short Note reaffirming some of our general aims. In this issue, No. 100, we are pleased to publish two studies in depth on the history and nature of the journal from its origins in 1952 until 1983. The first is by the three surviving founders of the journal still on the Editorial Board on its origins and early development. The second is an analysis and assessment of our more recent history from 1959 by Jacques Le Goff, co-director of Annales since 1969.

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ORIGINS AND EARLY YEARS

THE HISTORY OF PAST AND PRESENT BEGINS IN THE YEARS OF THE

cold war with a group of young Marxist historians, at that time all members of the British Communist Party and enthusiastic participants in the activities of the "C. P. Historians' Group" which flourished notably in the years 1946 to 1956. They had emerged from the war in their late twenties or early thirties and plunged into, or returned to, their planned or interrupted researches, and, in so far as they were already in academic posts or were lucky enough to find them before 1948, when Communists quietly ceased to be hired or promoted for a decade, most of them taught at universities, or hoped to. They thus had the quadruple bond of a common past (most had known one another since the late 1930s), a common political commitment, a passion for history, and regular, indeed intensive, contact at the meetings of the Historians' Group at which they debated the Marxist interpretation of historical problems and did their best, in the military jargon then favoured in Bolshevik circles, to "wage the battle of ideas" on the "front" most suitable to historians. Sometime in 1949 or early 1950 one member of this group of friends and comrades took it into his head that the world required a new historical journal, and persuaded, charmed, bored, exhausted or bulldozed anyone who might help to found it, into acquiescence. This was the late John Morris, the only begetter of Past and Present, to whom the journal has already paid tribute after his untimely death (No. 75, May 1977). Without him it would certainly not have come into existence, or possibly continued beyond its first two or three issues. At the same time Past and Present could neither have been started nor continued without what in the current crop of radical journals is known as a "collective" of Marxist and non-Marxist historians. With all his gifts as an animator, John Morris was neither a single-handed operator nor did he favour this mode of operation.

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While he mobilized anybody who might help him in realizing his dream, the core of the future journal was to consist of a small knot of friends. The three survivors of the group which took the first initiative have combined their memories with some research on the extant documents about the early years of Past and Present, made available by the kindness of Susan Morris, to reconstruct this account of the origins and early development of the journal. The journal which floated in John's mind was by no means a purely academic review, written by teachers and read by their colleagues and students. He certainly dreamed of a vast public of ordinary readers in their tens of thousands, thirsting to understand the past and to learn its lessons for the present. For various reasons this dream, about which his colleagues were sceptical from the outset, was not realized. Yet it has left Past and Present with a number of legacies. From the start the journal aimed to cover all history. It rejected purely monographic research reports, though insisting that the articles must have "a firm foundation of scholarly research" and, perhaps above all, that articles must be written in ordinary English prose and be comprehensible to non-specialist readers, or even, ideally, to those without historical training. Moreover, ideally any reader interested in history should be able to read every article in every issue, whatever its subject and period, with interest and profit. Not surprisingly, these aims have been realized only very incompletely, but they have continued to inspire the Editorial Board. The nature of the history which the new journal was to present requires rather more by way of commentary. It was, as has already been observed, initiated by a group of Marxists. Indeed John Morris's first suggested title was Bulletin of Marxist Historical Studies. This suggestion was almost immediately dropped, since Morris's friends were unprepared to put time and energy into so restricted and introspective a project. What they and almost immediately Morris himself could see as a task which made the effort worth while was a very much broader journal. Past and Present was thus specifically planned from the outset not as a Marxist historical review, but as one in which Marxists and non-Marxist historians would collaborate on the basis of a common "concern about the state of historical research and discussion at present", that is in so far as they had common historical tastes and interests and a common distaste, political, ideological or academic, for certain tendencies of history then in fashion. In short, we wished to draw the line not between the small body of Marxists and the totality of non-Marxists, but between what we saw as a minority of committed historical (and political) conservatives, not to mention the anti-Communist crusaders, and a potentially large body of those who had a common approach to history, whether they were Marxists or not. We were thus trying to continue, or to revive,

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in the post-war period the policies of broad unity we had learned in the days of pre-war anti-Fascism. The choice of title symbolized this aspiration. For shortly after the war a series of small historical volumes had been launched under the title "Past and Present", which had succeeded, without evident difficulty, in uniting authors of Marxist and distinctly non-Marxist views under the general motto of "Studies in the History of Civilization Designed to Show How History Can Help". It had published a number of excellent little works before succumbing to the forces which lie in wait for small, undercapitalized publishers whose books do not sell.1 In fact, we took over the dormant title by agreement with its former owners, and its chief inspirer V. Gordon Childe, joined the board of the new journal. Otherwise there were no connections between the old and new Past and Present. Although the founding members belonged to the Communist Party, the project was neither initiated by the Party nor its Historians' Group, nor even so far as we can recall ever formally authorized by either. However, both before and after its launching, the journal benefited considerably from the advice of various comrades consulted (mainly by Morris) on technical matters, and not least by the initial subscriptions we got from the left-wing public to which C. P. connection gave us privileged access. There is little doubt that without this preliminary cash-flow from politically interested readers, which gradually dropped off, we should have been unable to get off the ground at all. They were the people who were ready to buy a future pig in a poke largely because the poke seemed to be coloured red. Nevertheless, Past and Present was in no sense under Party control. Indeed, it was agreed on all hands that at this time it could not possibly have achieved its object of collaboration between Marxists and non-Marxists if it was or even appeared to be. In our dealings with Party or Group we were quite explicit in establishing that the journal was independent, and would accept no policy instructions. The first issue (February 1952) of the journal attempted to formulate the common ground on which the Marxist and non-Marxist members of the Editorial Board saw themselves as standing. Since this "Introduction" was, after much discussion some of it complex and acrimonious finally drafted jointly by Hobsbawm (who discovered a suitable quotation from Ibn Khaldun), Geoffrey Barraclough (who introduced Max Dvorak and Friedrich Meinecke) and John Morris (who brought in Polybius), it was plainly not a mere euphemistic reformulation of Marxism, though phrased in such a manner as
1 The Past and Present Series was published by Cobbett Press, a firm close to the Communist Party, under the editorship of V. Gordon Childe, Benjamin Farrington and Sydney Herbert (of the Universtiy College of Wales, Aberystwyth). Its authors included Gordon Childe, Grahame Clark, Roy Pascal, F. W. Walbank, E. Cecil Curwen and others.

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to be acceptable to both sides. On the positive side it stressed history as the history "of the transformations which society undergoes by its very nature", and this may have given Past and Present that lasting bent towards the social history which was not yet attracting much attention in the early 1950s. On the negative side it declared its opposition both to the reduction of history to the natural or social sciences and, at the opposite extreme, to historical iiTationalism and the denial of the capacity of history to generalize. Both have been misunderstood. It has recently been suggested that the journal was opposed to the social sciences until some time in the 1960s, when it clasped them to its bosom. 2 This is plainly not the case, since among the early contributions we find articles by an eminent academic sociologist (George Homans) and an eminent social anthropologist (Max Gluckman, who also joined the Board in 1957), not to mention the participation of a British sociologist as assistant editor from 1957 (Philip Abrams). Conversely, the initial subtitle A Journal of Scientific History, which expressed the belief that historical phenomena have an objective existence and may be studied by the methods of reason and science, was to arouse ideological suspicion some years later among those who thought it a synonym for Marxism. The subtitle was in fact dropped without significant resistance by any of the founders, and without any discernible effect on the content of the journal. Past and Present initially faced two almost insoluble problems: how to get born and survive at all, and how to realize its aim as a historical journal. It began without any funds at all, except 25 produced by the prospective Board members at one of their first meetings, a loan (or rather gift) by John Morris of the same amount, and 8 in donations from three well-wishers. An additional sum of 24. u s . , whose source is lost in Morris's indecipherable handwriting, appears to have also become available for what was described as "the Budget" for launching the first issue. This constituted the entire initial capital, mainly expended and indeed largely wasted on some 15,000 leaflets circularized to individuals and libraries and inserted into the Historical Associations' journal History with extremely modest results, and, a little less ineffectively, in the Marxist Modem Quarterly. (It is worth recording that, except for three most welcome annual grants from the British Academy very many years later, for the purpose of expanding the circulation of the journal, Past and Present has been financially self-supporting from the outset). By October 1951 there were 217 paid-up subscribers, whose confidence in the future of the journal was greater than the Editorial Board's which seriously considered whether to go on.
2 James Obelkevich, "Past and Present: Marxisme et histoire en Grande-Bretagne depuis la guerre", Le dibal, no. 17 (Dec. 1981), pp. 89-111.

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In fact, costs were so low the original printer's estimate came to about 220 for 1,000 copies of two issues of 64 pages that it did not need many subscriptions at the then rate of 15 shillings per annum to cover them. We found that the journal broke even at about 400 copies. In spite of the confusion which enveloped its finances and management, it never had any serious difficulty in maintaining itself. From time to time catastrophe seemed imminent, and there was a moment when a desperate search for a cheaper printer led us, for one disastrous issue, to abandon Messrs Titus Wilson of Kendal, who still print us. (Perhaps this is the point where a well-deserved tribute should be paid to that firm, and especially to the endless patience, tact and good temper of Mr. C. J. B. Pollitt, whose dealings with Past and Present in the earliest years, to judge by the surviving correspondence, required an ample supply of all these qualities.) In so far as the figures can be trusted, circulation fluctuated upwards, though by the end of 1958 it does not appear to have exceeded 750. Sales were divided almost equally between libraries, individuals and bulk orders from booksellers (some of which concealed subscriptions). Two-thirds of this circulation, it should be noted, was abroad. Nevertheless, the journal was on an even keel. This did not entirely solve the technical problems of publication. The Welsh fairies, which had endowed the infant John Morris with numerous gifts not least a disarming shaggy charm, unlimited if not always narrowly focussed energy, stubborn determination and a memorable ability to talk people into agreement, acquiescence, fury and subsequent reconciliation had denied him the gift of managerial efficiency. To be more exact, they had also saddled him with an instinct for conducting his life, affairs and enterprises from one crisis to another, in a cloud of uncertainty, approximation and improvization, by a series of devices which, had they been machines, would have resembled those designed by Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg. One's memories of him tend to focus on catastrophes narrowly averted or overcome by some complex manoeuvre, but invariably faced with zest and good temper. Always hopeful, he never bore grudges. Others, less habituated than he to this unending battle never abandoned and never quite lost, often found co-operative enterprises led by him trying. The assistant editors (some themselves far from models of organizational competence) and the business managers, whose task it was to keep the small boat of Past and Present moderately seaworthy, sometimes exploded. They carried on through devotion to the journal and, in spite of all, friendship and fondness for its founder. John would always be John. He fathered the journal. He found designer and printer. His gift for diplomacy and for being liked did more than anything else to make co-operation with suspicious non-Marxists possible. Who could possibly have seen him as a

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Machiavellian manipulator or deceiver? He got it launched against all odds. He continued to water it with a stream of proposals and suggestions, often stimulating but not necessarily always realistic, to insist on comprehensibility and the common reader, and, somehow, to get it out. But it cannot be denied that the task of planning and publishing each issue was often complicated and generally prolonged by his interventions. And yet. Whatever Noah's weaknesses (and they were not John's), probably nobody who joined him on his curious craft and survived the Flood ever afterwards lacked appreciation for the patriarch. Those who were in Past and Present from the start felt that way about John Morris, and still do. Of course the journal also benefited from the subsidy provided by the unlimited free labour of editors, Board members and the (mainly female) friends and students dragooned into the thankless job of business manager, before its affairs were somewhat more professionalized at the end of the 1950s. A more permanent alliance between one of the business managers and a board member was to be an incidental consequence of these early years. This saved costs, as did the deliberate decision to expand the size and frequency of the journal only very gradually. Until 1962 it appeared twice a year, and before i960 the number of pages per annum did not reach 200. The reasons for this caution were not only economic. If Past and Present established itself very rapidly indeed in the historical world, it was largely because from the outset the Board agreed unanimously that its size must depend on the number of articles of the requisite quality which it could attract. And initially this was not large. For the second problem it faced, in the years when the Cold War was at its most glacial, was indeed daunting. At no time were nonCommunists (historians or not) more suspicious or fearful of public association with Communists, or indeed subject to greater pressures to avoid such association. At least one eminent scholar prepared to join the Board (the late Rudolf Wittkower) was pressed into resigning from it before the first issue. At least one other scholar of great eminence, with personal experience of political discrimination, postponed his first contribution to Past and Present until it no longer carried the Communist stigma. Moreover, the red spectre haunted not only potential Board members and contributors, but subscribers. For several years the Institute of Historical Research in London resisted all appeals to take the journal. For this reason Past and Present owes an incalculable debt to those established non-Marxist scholars who were prepared to take part in the enterprise from the start, at the risk of being accused of lending respectability to the red menace. Chief among these were A. H. M. Jones, the distinguished ancient historian from Cambridge, beyond attack as a man and a scholar, and R. R. Betts, Masaryk Professor

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of Central European History at the University of London. Even with their help, and that of Geoffrey Barraclough who soon resigned from the board for a variety of reasons, but which did not include either nervousness or reluctance to co-operate with Marxists there was plainly a Marxist majority on the Board. This consisted at the outset of Morris as editor, Hobsbawm as assistant editor, Barraclough, Berts, Gordon Childe the archaeologist, Maurice Dobb the economist, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, A. H. M. Jones and D. B. Quinn, then professor at Swansea, who also resigned shortly. (However, he was or had until recently been sympathetic to Marxism.) Nor was there any immediate prospect of turning this majority into a minority. In order to provide a visible guarantee against "Marxist domination", the Board adopted two devices, one of which survives. In the first place, all manuscripts had to be read by all Board members, a form of collectivism which is no longer entirely practicable with a Board of the present size, though a modified version of it is still in force. This had the unpredicted advantage of allowing the Past and Present editorial team to evolve an undefined but very effective set of criteria by which to judge articles, and an unusual degree of consensus. It is difficult, indeed impossible, to recall any manuscript over the past thirty years on which opinion among Board members has divided along ideological lines. In the second place, so long as non-Marxists were in a clear minority, any one of them was given a de facto right of veto over any manuscript. While this arrangement lasted, we cannot recall that such a veto was ever exercised. It proved easier to recruit a Board of Foreign Advisers, largely through our Marxist contacts abroad. They included Claude Cahen the French orientalist, Delio Cantimori in Italy and J. V. Polisensky in Prague, all at that time members of their Communist parties, the great and revolutionary Georges Lefebvre, Max Crawford of Melbourne, Max Savelle from the U.S.A. (about both of whose politics we knew little) and Abdul Haq of Karachi, an ancient Moslem scholar about whom nobody except Morris claimed to know anything, but whose eminence we took on trust, welcoming him as a representative of the Third World. They were later reinforced by Rodolfo Mondolfo and Jose Luis Romero from Buenos Aires, D. P. Mukherji from Aligarh, Jean Hecht from New York, and that senior pillar of Japanese Marxist scholarship, H. K. Takahashi. This list advertised our world-wide interests without quite concealing the patchiness of our overseas contacts, but, as usual, proved to be more decorative than useful. However, it got us contributions from Cahen, Polisensky, Mondolfo and, to the acute embarrassment of one Board member, a survey of Italian historiography from Cantimori which was turned down. Collective decision made it easier for Past and

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Present to apply the same rigorous criteria to its own team as to outside contributors. Foreign advisers were to be quietly dropped after the first twenty-five issues. Given our situation, no articles were initally submitted. All had to be commissioned, with the still valid proviso that no publication could be guaranteed until a collective decision had been reached. The Editorial Board did what it could, except for Dobb who remained loyal but silent throughout. Jones, Betts, Hill, Hilton, Hobsbawm, Morris and Gordon Childe all contributed one or more articles in the first dozen issues, as did Brian Manning who joined Hobsbawm as assistant editor in 1954. For the rest, we tapped our friends, colleagues and anyone else we had access to. With the exception of Hill, none of us as yet had students sufficiently mature to produce learned articles. The Communist historians were an obvious source, though in retrospect there are surprising gaps: one notes the absence, until many years later in the history of the journal, of E. P. Thompson. Undergraduate contemporaries, whether or not they had put their student Marxism behind them, were open to the appeal of friendship. Colleagues in university and college were a third. Nor should we forget established historians of an old-fashioned radicalism or heterodoxy who were prepared to help the outcasts. W. G. Hoskins gave us a splendid article, Richard Pares was prepared to lend his name, Barraclough wrote for us even when he found membership of the Board intolerable. Fortunately our foreign contacts were unusually good, and probably better than those of any other British historical journal except Postan's Economic History Review. From November 1953 on, every issue for several years contained one or two articles by foreign contributors: George C. Homans, Albert Soboul, Claude Cahen, J. V. Polisensky, E. A. Kosminsky, Jean Chesneaux, B. F. Porshnev, R. S. Lopez, A. Klfma, Pierre Vilar, Pierre Goubert, Owen Lattimore to mention only some who appeared, in some cases for the first time in English, in the course of four years. We benefited partly from the internationalism of the Marxist Left, reinforced by the Board members' travels in Europe the U.S.A. posed visa problems for a number of them and partly by the welcome of British colleagues for temporary visitors. But, as it so happened, at least two Board members had begun to establish personal relations in Paris, then rapidly developing into a powerhouse of historical innovation. The reference to Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in the first issue of Past and Present already indicates this French connection. It had been established both through the influence of the brilliant, cosmopolitan and infuriating economic historian Postan who against his intentions had inspired several able Marxist historians,

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II

and through the 1950 International Historical Congress in Paris, which marked the first triumph of the Annales approach to history. The Congress, and especially the then novel section on "Social History" organized under its auspices,3 enabled us to make contact with historians then virtually unknown, like Goubert and Vilar (who were soon to write for us) and Jean Meuvret, whose stimulus helped to launch Past and Present into the "Seventeenth-Century Crisis", and thus to provoke a major historical debate which did much to establish international interest in the journal. Taken all in all, we succeeded in building a more than respectable little journal. In retrospect, the contents of Past and Present between 1952 and 1958 shows disproportionately few weak or trivial articles, a good number of stimulating papers, and several genuinely innovatory or even "classic" pieces. About two-thirds of the content of the first twelve issues was written by Marxists, though often only biographical information makes it possible to distinguish between these and the remaining third. With few exceptions, the Marxist articles came from western Europe, though we were anxious, on both scholarly and general grounds, to break down the iron curtain between East and West. Even more striking was our failure to acquire more than a sprinkling of articles on non-European history, especially from non-European historians. This still remains a substantial problem, but the third striking characteristic of the early years of Past and Present, the exiguity of contributions from or about the U.S.A., proved temporary. It reflected our own ignorance of the American historical scene, the journal's lack of circulation and prestige, and no doubt also the reluctance of U.S. historians in the 1950s to be associated with Marxists. For Past and Present, though rapidly establishing itself as what Lawrence Stone described as "perhaps the liveliest historical journal in the country", certainly continued to be regarded, if not as a Marxist journal then at least as one under Marxist or Communist domination. This was so even after several of the founding group had left or been expelled from the Communist Party in 1956-7. It was therefore still difficult to achieve the broadening of the Board which had always been the aim of the founders. It was indeed reinforced in 1957 by Max Gluckman the anthropologist and the agrarian historian Joan Thirsk, but only in 1958 was a major breakthrough achieved when the sociologists Norman Birnbaum and Peter Worsley, the Roman archaeologist S. S. Frere, John Elliott of Cambridge and Lawrence
3 One member of the future Editorial Board found himself, to his surprise, asked to take the chair at the "Contemporary Period" session of this section, presiding over the discussion of a Report by the (absent) Polish historian M. Malowist himself later a contributor to Past and Present on the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries.

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Stone of Oxford (both now at Princeton) joined, while Trevor Aston who became de facto editor in John Morris's place in i960 joined Philip Abrams and Hobsbawm as assistant editor. But it was not achieved without difficulties. In effect, Stone who made himself the spokesman for a group of potential entrants, was prepared to join only on certain conditions, which included the collective entry of "a group of non-Marxists, the appointment of an editor or additional editor in whose judgement and political neutrality the existing board and ourselves and the outside world will have confidence", and the dropping of the journal's subtitle. He pointed out, correctly enough, that "I think you underestimate the degree of suspicion that surrounds the board as at present constituted. I believe that in actual fact it is this suspicion that has caused so many refusals so far, even if it has been disguised under excuses of pressure of work, etc". Stone's terms raised only one major difficulty. They appeared to imply a major change in the organization of the journal, by demoting the enlarged Board (which "would at once become far too big to exercise detailed editorial control as at present"). The dropping of the subtitle was in itself trivial, unless it implied a change in the nature of the journal. The addition of several new members who wanted to be associated with Past and Present, did not hesitate to collaborate with Marxists and were unquestionably non-Marxists themselves, was precisely what we had always striven for. Even a change of editor was far from unacceptable to some of the existing Board, given the necessity for more efficient management. Ah1 that his friends and co-founders felt was that the achievement of the original architect of the journal must guarantee him his proper place at the head of our table. But what, we thought, the new entrants had as yet been unable to discover were the peculiar merits of our collective mode of procedure. As in Annales (which already treated Past and Present with considerable respect), our strength lay in the fact that, to quote one Board member, "we have been a team of people who know each other, have roughly the same sort of ideas, co-opt people of the same kind. We have not been just a group of younger dons as distinct from older dons". And it has been the collegiality of the Board which enabled us to know each other, to formulate a consensus about the sort of history we wanted to encourage irrespective of ideological or other divergences within the Board to establish policies and perspectives for the journal, however tacitly and empirically, and to establish a flexible continuity of policy. To change the Board's procedures, we felt, was to change Past and Present, not merely to dissipate political suspicion. Fortunately the new entrants did not want to change the character of the journal which they liked the way it was, give or take the odd

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13

article. That, presumably, was why they were willing to join it in the first place. It is also possible that they saw the force in Morris's comment: "If you impose on us the organisational structure of E.H.R. [the English Historical Review], you will sooner or later get a journal like E.H.R.; . . . the obvious practical difficulties created by a larger Board can be overcome by evolution rather than revolution". Hence the Board was enlarged, but retained essentially its old functions. A new assistant editor was added with spectacularly beneficial consequences. And the subtitle was dropped. In spite of what has been argued retrospectively, the new regime brought no significant change in the journal, except to give it greater public respectability, a larger size, more frequent publication and increased circulation. The proportion of articles by Marxists diminished with the growth in the number of historians prepared indeed, increasingly eager to publish in Past and Present. If one surveys the content of the twelve issues (Nos. 14-25) which followed the broadening of the Board, it is difficult to identify any articles which the Boards of 1952-8 would not have been happy to welcome either for their authors' names, on their merits, or as considered criticism of some thesis first put forward in the journal. The enlarged Board operated as before, and in fact, if anything, more consistent practical participation was henceforth expected of its members. Its discussions continued as before. No ideological or political issues of substance have disturbed its work as a team, or the relations between its members. The later history of Past and Present does not belong to this brief memoir. But we would not wish to conclude it without recalling the founders and early Board members who are now dead. Betts, Jones and Gordon Childe were the first to go. Betts, a saturnine-looking democrat, expert on the Hussites, had been deeply hurt by developments in his beloved Czechoslovakia after 1948, but did not hesitate for a moment to lend his name, prestige and pen to a journal with the convictions of whose Communist founders he had not the slightest sympathy. There were not many such in 1949-52. Gordon Childe was in his time the most distinguished name in Marxist history anywhere, and one of the most distinguished in any brand of archaeology. Some of the earliest meetings of the Board were held at his flat. We admired this lonely, ugly, friendly man who watched television in a gothic pub on Tottenham Court Road, without fully recognizing the desperation which drove him to suicide shortly after retirement to his native Australia. Hugo Jones, a small silent Welshman with the radical convictions of his people, came to us through that other Welshman, John Morris, with whom he established a curious rapport of restrained intimacy, and whose wind-buffeted academic career he did much to help and protect. Since he was much

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the most prestigious and senior academic figure among our nonMarxists, he almost certainly did more by his presence and contributions to keep Past and Present out of the ghetto than anyone else. About John Morris we have already said much. Perhaps his contribution to Past and Present derived from the fact that he was far from a typical academic. He had begun his career in politics (he claimed, with mixed feelings, to have recruited a young Oxford Liberal, Harold Wilson, to Labour), and only turned to research and teaching after the war. As a politician he probably felt happiest in the unstructured and libertarian atmosphere of the anti-nuclear campaigns than in any of his more formal affiliations. Discipline and organization sat lightly on him. As a scholar, gradually drawn from classical antiquity through Roman and post-Roman Britain into the middle ages, he swept forwards and sideways in a whirl of suggestive and often brilliant ideas, but his eyes were always fixed on the wider public for which he wrote. His most ambitious projects were aimed far beyond the university. Two of them survive him. One is the republication in a series of small volumes of Domesday Book, which has carried on since his death. The other is Past and Present. Whatever it has become, and whatever the contribution of others before and after i960, it remains in a real sense his monument. Christopher Hill R. H. Hilton E.J. Hobsbawm

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LATER HISTORY
TO A REGULAR READER OF PAST AND PRESENT SINCE ITS APPEARANCE

in 1952, the "breakthrough" of 1958 did not seem to mark a significant turning-point. Perhaps the impression is due to two of my own limitations. In the first place I knew nothing of the personal biographies of the members of the journal's Editorial Board. Secondly, never having had any prejudice against Marxism, provided it was open and undogmatic, I was totally able to accept a publication in which there was certainly an element of Marxism but which gave no impression of being subject to a dogma, still less to a party. It was not until after the event and without considering it to be of much importance (from the point of view of the journal), that I noticed, towards the end of the 1950s, that the close association of some Board members either with a particular form of Marxism or with the British Communist Party had been abandoned. It was not until later that I