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Edited
by
This
new collection of biographical essays brings to life a diverse and colourful
cavalcade of British revolutionaries from the first part of the twentieth
century. The cast includes pioneering women Communists, doughty trade union
leaders and dusty apparatchiks, together with lawyers, poets, critics and
the odd sexual outlaw.The book also depicts the tragic fate of groups of British
Communists who encountered Stalinism at first hand in the USSR. Much of the
information in this section - as elsewhere in the book - is the result of
new research on recently released material from previously closed archives
in Moscow.
These perceptive readings of individual lives qualitatively extend our comprehension of the complexities of the European left, particularly when read alongside the editors' essays which explore the importance of biography to history in general and to communist history in particular.Alan Campbell teaches in the School of History, University of Liverpool. He is the author of the two-volume The Scottish Miners, 1874-1939 (2000).John McIlroy is a Reader in Sociology at the University of Manchester. He is the editor, with Alan Campbell and Nina Fishman, of the two-volume British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, 1945-79 (1999).Kevin Morgan teaches politics at the University of Manchester. He is author of a biography of Harry Pollitt and editor of Socialist History.Contributors Alan Campbell, Gisela Chan Mang Fong, Gideon Cohen, Andy Croft, David Howell, Karen Hunt, Nina Fishman, John McIlroy, Barry McLoughlin and Kevin Morgan