My short, bitter-sweet marriage to the radical historian Raphael Samuel

In a telling moment early on in A Radical Romance, Alison Light admits that she once identified with the character of Jo March, the tomboy in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Jo, it will be recalled, is the sister who marries a professor, years older than her, a German immigrant called Friedrich Bhaer, who is tender and warm and encourages her writing. In many ways it’s a model modern partnership.

Light found her own professor in the shape of Raphael Samuel. In 1987 she married him, following a whirlwind courtship. He was in his early fifties, from a Jewish communist family that traced its roots back to Russia and Eastern Europe. A self-declared communist from the age of eight, Samuel had left the party in 1956 after the revelations of Stalin’s crimes and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He went on to become a charismatic figure on the British left. As a founder of the History Workshop, he was an influential historian, committed to the idea of a people’s history, or ‘history from below’.