A great scholar, too. Lost to history, I had thought, until I read this from Carrol. The Human Essence is my favourite, followed by Aeschylus and Athens. He was at Birmingham University in the sixties, and much harried by the authorities there, coming a generation before Stuart Hall's Centre for Cultural Studies at Birmingham (which I think he had no truck with). Thompson supported a small Maoist breakaway from the Communist Party of Great Britain, (the CPB-ML, of led by Reg Birch, I think) judging (rightly, but belatedly) that the party's 'British Road to Socialism' manifesto was a move to the right.
His cultural analyses, being both materialistic and unashamedly classical is out of favour today, but there is a great deal in The Human Essence which will still be true long after Stuart Hall has been forgotten.
-- Jim heartfield