Christopher hill historian biography

In other projects. Wikidata item. This article does not have any sources. You can help Wikipedia by finding good sources, and adding them. The Centre for Intellectual History may mark a new departure for the University of Oxford, but the discipline has a long and vibrant past in this institution. The disaggregated and heterogeneous nature of this history—which may have forestalled any earlier attempts to carve out a formal place for intellectual history at Oxford—is marked by the same plurality of focus and method that the new Centre seeks to make a virtue.

One of the most peculiar intellectual historians in this tradition was Christopher Hill — Hill read for his undergraduate degree at Balliol, graduating inafter which he migrated to All Souls. After a brief spell at Cardiff University, Hill returned to Balliol inwhere he served as a fellow either side of war work, untilwhen he became Master. The association of Hill with intellectual history may, at first, appear less immediately convincing.

This might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the Protestant ethic. The object of the present book is to look at this revolt within the Revolution and the fascinating flood of radical ideas which it threw up. History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.

The Levellers were better understood as political democracy established itself in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England; the Diggers have something to say to twentieth-century socialists. Now that the Protestant ethic itself, the greatest achievement of European bourgeois society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is at last being questioned after a rule of three or four centuries, we can study with a new sympathy the Diggers, the Ranters, and the many other daring thinkers who in the seventeenth century refused to bow down and worship it.

The undoubted dominance of Christopher Hill in the history of the English Revolution may be attributed to his prolific record of books and articles, and his continuous engagement in debate with other historians; to the breadth of his learning, embracing the history of literature, the law, science, as well as religion and economics; to the fact that his work set the agenda and the standard to which all historians of the period had to address themselves, whether in support of or opposition to his methods and interpretations; but above all to the inspiration he drew from Marxism.

The English Revolution took place in a culture dominated by religious ideas and religious language, and Christopher Hill recognised that he had to uncover the social context of religion in order to find the key to understanding the English Revolution, and as a Marxist to ascertain the interrelationships between the intellectual and social aspects of the period.

Christopher Hill spent his life seeking to persuade people that the English Revolution was a decisive event or, as he titled his last book, England's Turning Pointand he succeeded. A brilliant, often sardonic wit, an incisive mind, and a deeply compassionate person, he was the finest product of the British christopher hill historian biography tradition, and he did more than anybody to establish Marxism as central to that tradition.

It is hard to accept that there will no longer, year by year, be a new book by Christopher Hill, enlightening, stimulating new thoughts, and no doubt something to quarrel with. Christopher Hill, who has died aged 91, was the commanding interpreter of 17th-century England, and of much else besides. As a public figure, he achieved his greatest fame as master of Balliol College, Oxford, a christopher hill historian biography he held from until Yet it was as the defining Marxist historian of the century of revolution, the title of one of the most widely studied of his many books, that he became known to generations of students around the world.

For all these, too, he will always be the master. It would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that Hill created the way in which the people of late 20th-century Britain - and the left in particular - looked at the history of 17th-century England. As he never tired of pointing out, some of the themes he illuminated so richly had already been explored by left-wing scholars in the s.

But fromwhen he published his tercentenary essay, The English Revolutionhis own voluminously expanding and unfailingly literate work became the starting point of most subsequent interpretation, even for those who rejected his method and conclusions. No historian of recent times was so synonymous with his period of study; he is the reason why most of us know anything about the 17th century at all.

He was, EP Thompson once said, the dean and paragon of English historians. Hill was born in York, where his father was a solicitor. His parents were Methodists, a fact to which he attributed his lifelong political and intellectual apostasy. Though his life was to be the embodiment of a secularised form of dissent, his high moral seriousness and egalitarianism surely had roots in this radical Protestant background.

Galbraith, in particular, was to remain an immense influence. Hill's association with Balliol was to continue, with only brief interruptions, from his arrival as an undergraduate in until his retirement as master 47 years later. Academic honours regularly fell his way, starting with the prestigious Lothian prize inand continuing with a first-class degree in and an All Souls fellowship that winter.

But he was a successful rugby player too, the scorer of a famous cup-winning try for Balliol. Even more lastingly, he had become a Marxist. Exactly when and why this happened is uncertain, since Hill was always notoriously inscrutable about discussing his personal life. He once claimed it came about through trying to make sense of the 17th-century metaphysical poets, but although he read Marx as an undergraduate, the moment of his conversion to communism is elusive.

Christopher hill historian biography

His contemporary, RW Southern, once teasingly remembered "a time when Christopher was not in the least bit leftish", but Hill was an undergraduate during the period of the great depression, the hunger marches, the New Deal, Hitler's rise he visited the Weimar Republic before going up to Oxfordand the first favourable impact of Stalin in the west.

He was a regular attender at GDH Cole's Thursday Lunch Club, where, as he once put it, "I was forced to ask questions about my own society which had previously not occurred to me. Certainly by the time he graduated, Hill had joined the Communist party. Inhe spent a year in the Soviet Union, during which he was very ill, but also formed a lasting affection for Russian life - and a somewhat less lasting one for Soviet politics.

After Moscow, he had two years as an assistant lecturer at University College, Cardiff, before returning to Balliol as a fellow and tutor in modern history. Inhe was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry, before becoming a major in the intelligence corps and being seconded to the Foreign Office from until the end of the war.

This was, to put it mildly, an intriguing period, about which he rarely let fall much detail. Then, inarising out of intensive debate among a group of Marxist historians, who included Leslie Morton, Robin Page Arnot and - particularly influential on Hill - Dona Torr, came the decisive The English Revolution The essay was originally published as one of a collection of three reflections the others were by Margaret James and Edgell Rickword.

Hill's contribution, which was subsequently published alone, was a no-holds-barred assertion of the revolutionary nature of England between andand an assault on the traditional presentation of these years as an aberration in the stately continuity of English history. The book, he said, "was written very fast and in a good deal of anger, [and] was intended to be my last will and testament.

The discussions surround- ing Hill's essay also produced, inthe Communist Party Historians Group, an association he regarded as "the greatest single influence" on his subsequent work. It also generated the path-breaking collection of documents, The Good Old Cause, that he edited with Dell in The active, year involvement with communism, which also led to his short biography, Lenin And The Russian Revolutioncame to a crisis after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in Along with many in the CP, Hill had become disenchanted with the party's lack of democracy and its reluctance to criticise the Soviet Union.

Both issues came to a head in the late weeks ofthough his own break did not come until the following year. He was appointed to a CP review of inner-party democracy, but the rejection of the critical minority report, written by Hill with Peter Cadogan and Malcolm MacEwenprecipitated his final departure. These were watershed years in Hill's personal life too.

A wartime marriage to Inez Waugh, the former wife of a colleague, produced a home life which combined the high seriousness of Balliol Marxism with an extravagant bohemianism. It also produced their daughter Fanny Hill, later a dashing figure on the Oxford scene, who drowned off the Spanish coast in her 40s. The marriage collapsed early and, inhe married again, this time to Bridget Sutton, then a history tutor with the Workers' Educational Association in Staffordshire.

Turbulence was replaced by the single greatest happiness of Hill's life. With Bridget obituary, August 13he had a son and two christophers hill historian biography, one of whom died in a car accident. AfterHill's career ascended to new heights as he began the remarkable output of books on which his reputation will rest, and which continued undiminished until he was well into his 80s.

In Hill was elected Master of Balliol College. Among his students at Balliol was Brian Manningwho went on to develop understanding of the English Revolution. Many of Hill's most notable studies focused on 17th-century English history. Hill retired from Balliol inwhen he took up a full-time appointment for two years at the Open University.

He continued to lecture from his home at Sibford FerrisOxfordshire. In Hill's later years he lived with Alzheimer's disease and required constant care. The Hills' marriage broke down after ten years. Their only child, their daughter, Fanny, drowned while holidaying in Spain in She was the ex-wife of Stephen Mason, a fellow Communist and historian.

Their daughter Kate died in a car accident in They had two other children: Andrew born and Dinah born Hill, along with Hobsbawm, was spied on by MI5 for decades. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikiquote Wikidata item. English historian.