> Talk about self-marginalisation...
The Last Romantic By Tony Judt Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life by Eric Hobsbawm
Pantheon, 448 pp., $30.00
[2] See, for example, Raphael Samuel, "The Lost World of British Communism" (Part I), New Left Review, No. 154 (November/December 1985), pp. 3–53, where he sketches a marvelous portrait of "an organization under siege,...[maintaining] the simulacrum of a complete society, insulated from alien influences, belligerent towards outsiders, protective of those within"; "a visible church," as Samuel tells it, tracing "an unbroken line of descent from the founding fathers, claiming scriptural precedent for our policies, adopting patristic labels for our anathemas." http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16802
Alas, there was never a part two of the Samuel piece in NLR. One of the best historical essays they've ever run.
-- Michael Pugliese