I met Christopher Hill only once—in the summer of 1980. Having just completed finals at Cambridge, a friend and I decided to launch a college history magazine which would feature interviews with top historians. Aiming high, we wrote to Hill, who, despite never having heard of us before, invited us both to his cottage in Sibford Ferris, Oxfordshire, where he let us probe him with questions for over two hours. It was a remarkable act of intellectual generosity, but seemingly typical of the man. Hill was also gracious about historians who were critical of him: back in Cambridge, John Morrill feared what Hill might have to say about him, but in fact Hill was full of praise for Morrill, whom he saw as leading the way towards a new synthesis of the causes of the English Civil War.

For early modernists of my generation, Hill was a towering figure in the field: I had read him first for A-levels as a sixteen-year-old. His output was prodigious and had to be engaged with. He was also a man of seeming contradictions: a Marxist intellectual and former member of the Communist Party (resigning in 1957, following the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary) who became Master of an Oxford College (Balliol) and was a frequent broadcaster on the BBC, two pillars of the establishment.

In Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian, Michael Braddick has done a superb job in helping us understand this intriguing and deeply influential scholar. Writing a biography of Hill is no easy task: there are working papers but few personal ones, though the intelligence services did keep files on Hill for quite some time, while Braddick has also made use of the reminiscences of people who knew him. Hill was born in York in 1912 and raised a Methodist. Although quite sporty, he was by nature shy and struggled with a stammer. Entering Balliol in 1931, the first in his family to go to university, by the time he graduated he had abandoned Methodism and become a Marxist. Braddick's chapters explore different phases of Hill's life chronologically, though the chapters themselves are analytical rather than straightforward narratives, making them more critically engaged. Thus Braddick explores Hill's turn to Marxism and then Communism, his political activism, early academic life, wartime service (both as a soldier and then in the Foreign Office), romantic life (his “affair” with Shiela Grant Duff and marriages to Inez Waugh and Bridget Sutton), political and academic writings, role in launching the journal Past and Present, prominence as a public intellectual, pedagogical style as a tutor at Balliol, stint as Master from 1965 to 1978 (when he had to navigate the student unrest of the late 60s and early 70s and the pressure to reform college admissions), personal tragedies, and accomplishments in retirement (including his work for the Open University).

Hill was a controversial figure throughout his life and even after death, feared or disliked by those who hated what they thought or imagined he stood for, intellectually and politically, or who were critical of his vision of seventeenth-century England. Braddick confronts these issues head on: he is clearly an admirer, though his book is no hagiography. Hill remained an apologist of Stalin's for too long, though he did admit in later life that he was wrong. However, subsequent accusations that during the war Hill was a spy and even had a Russian handler are palpably false, as the intelligence files themselves confirm. As a historian, Hill wore his Marxism lightly: his works were not heavily theoretical, and he was no economic reductionist. There was, however, an issue with Hill's historical method, first pointed out by the economist Jacob Viner in 1961 in a letter to Hill about one of his essays, and then more publicly by J.H. Hexter in 1975: Hill, his critics alleged, took quotes from seventeenth-century sources out of context and tended to find in his sources evidence that supported his preconceived ideas, problems that derived less from his history being theory-led and more from the limitations of his notetaking. As an intellectual, Hill was open-minded and believed in (indeed relished) critical scholarly debate, and as an educator he felt passionately that his students should learn to think for themselves: to take one's thought from other people, Hill once said, was a sin against the Holy Ghost.

Braddick concludes by pointing to areas Hill might have explored but did not. Hill had little to say about women's history, even though his interest in plebeian radicalism might have led him in that direction, and one of his star pupils—Keith Thomas—had shown the way in an article published in 1958. Hill wrote in 1985 that historians had a duty to assess the issue of race, now that so many British citizens were descendants of slaves, yet he never did so himself, despite recognizing the importance of the slave trade as a source of capital formation. Braddick concedes that since the 1960s “a new generation of economic and social historians” has “produced work that is technically superior” to Hill's (246). Today, Hill has a higher reputation among literary scholars than among historians; his work on Milton, in particular, remains in high regard. As for myself, I was always inspired by the type of history Hill set out to write, even though I recognized the flaws and did not always agree with Hill's conclusions. From Braddick's portrayal, Hill emerges as a passionate man, but one of integrity, by nature quite humble and even self-deprecating, and dedicated to his students—even welcoming, as in my case, to undergraduates from another place. This Life is a fascinating read, offering insight into not only one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century but also the times that helped produce him, and hopefully will inspire a younger generation to rediscover Hill and his incredible corpus of scholarship.