How the activities of MI5 have helped socialist historians
Aside from Christopher Hill, both E P Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm had MI5 files. Those for Hill stop in 1962 when started at Balliol. Whether all the material on Thompson and Hobsbawm is in the public domain is much less clear
For some years after 1945, the British security agencies kept tabs on Hill’s doings, as they did on other known party members. It must be doubted whether MI5 ever intended to provide invaluable assistance to future historians, but its obsessive logging of various suspects’ everyday doings (recording, for example, that Hill lent his car to a party organiser ‘to give a talk in Banbury’) has resulted in a small goldmine of sources in the National Archives, well exploited by Braddick as by Richard Evans in his biography of Hill’s comrade, Eric Hobsbawm. In this respect, biographers of leading left-wing figures have an advantage that those who write about less suspect individuals can only envy.Stefan Collini, review of Michael Braddick, Christopher Hill, The Life of a Radical Historian, London Review of Books May 22nd 2025
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