The thwarted Marxist of Balliol

The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 by Christopher Hill was published in 1961 .

Michael Braddick’s biographical study: The Life of a Radical Historian is published by Verso Verso .

The huge influence of Hill 's work has now been brought to our own generation of historians.

The biography of one of the 20th century ’s greatest and most significant Marxist historians.

Born in Yorkshire , Hill spent decades of his academic life not just in Oxford but at one of its oldest and most prestigious Colleges , Balliol .

The key task of the historian was to work out in convincing way the relationship between individual choices and the wider structures and processes within which they had to be taken.

The impact of this vanguard of historians upon my own generation was enormous, says Andrew Hill .

Hill, along with Thompson, Hobsbawm and the other British Marxist historians, saw close links between what they regarded as the crisis of bourgeois civilisation in the 20th century and comparable crises in the past.

But Hill barely involved himself in politics at all.