What did the great Marxist historian Christopher Hill think of orgies? Michael Braddick’s splendid and judicious biography doesn’t ponder this question. However, it strikes me as worth posing since, for a three-week period in the winter of 1978, an ensemble of actors (including the future Hollywood star Bob Hoskins) could be found naked at the National Theatre simulating group sex in Hill’s name.
The actors were performing in Keith Dewhurst’s radical stage adaptation of Hill’s masterpiece of 17th-century popular history The World Turned Upside Down (1972) and were embodying what it might have been like to be enthusiastic members of one of the radical millenarian sects at the centre of Hill’s study. The Evening Standard was scandalised; requiring performers to ‘jiggle their private parts’ for paying punters was nothing more than ‘gratuitous pornography’. When he attended rehearsals, by contrast, Hill seems not to have been outraged but, according to Dewhurst, ‘behaved with absolute modesty and tact’.
There can’t be many professional historians of the 17th century who have found themselves in this position. But, as Braddick’s book richly and scrupulously details, there haven’t been many historians like Christopher Hill. He didn’t publish his first scholarly monograph, Economic Problems of the Church (1956), until his forties, but by the end of his life he had written 25 books, several major source editions, and countless reviews, including 110 for The Spectator, even though he was, openly, a lifelong Marxist and sometime communist (he left the party in 1957).
As Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and a regular contributor to the Third Programme (a forerunner for Radio 3), Hill was a pre-eminent public intellectual who was also shy and occasionally laconic.
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