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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 172 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 172, February 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Nick Howard’s review of John Saville’s new book on the foreign policy of the post-1945 Labour government gives a balanced account of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. But there is a key point of context which he misses.
Although members of the Communist Party Historians’ Group, of which Saville was a member up to 1956, often talked of the need to ‘become historians of the present too’ they totally failed to carry this into practice. The problem of explaining what had happened in Russia and the endless twists and turns of Stalinist politics held them back.
Saville’s work is in fact the first sustained piece of historical research into a post-1945 subject ever carried out by someone from the Historians’ Group and Saville deserves credit for making the break from examining the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, important though work in these areas, including Saville’s own, has been.
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Keith Flett |
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