1. For over fifty years Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Rodney Hilton were the core of this century's most important and influential group of historians. With a cast of supporting players and critics, they form the subjects of this protracted essay on their intellectual and historiographical development from the 1930s to virtually the present day. Despite the provocative wording of its subtitle and a tasteless cover design, this is a serious and penetrating study, a detailed and intelligent grappling with the historiography of the English Revolution over the last fifty years and it should be read and pondered by all who are concerned about the future of the historical discipline in this country.

2. As the focus of the book is the English Revolution, the central figure tends to be Christopher Hill but where theoretical issues, with which Hill was never shown any great preoccupation, come to the fore, others - Thompson, Kiernan and, more latterly, Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, Andrew Milner, Brian Manning, E M Wood and Robert Brenner - are drawn in. MacLachlan begins, however, by tracing, in eighteenth-century Scots sociology and early nineteenth-century French liberals' accounts of bourgeoise struggle, the origins of Marx's socially determined bourgeoise revolution as the decisive episode in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The alternative model, traced back by him to Hume and Guizot, depicted the middle classes as agents of social development and progress with revolutionary upheaval as at best a very marginal occurrence, and led on to the histories of Macaulay and Gardiner in which 1688 was the model transition. The young Hill was nurtured amidst the sterilities of the whiggish consensus of the 1920s and 30s. The English past was one of evolutionary calm only occasionally punctuated by-violent upheavals consequent upon political blunders or a kind of civic bad manners.

3. As opposed to this, the intellectual attractions of interwar Marxism were obvious. Maurice Dobb's studies in early capitalism, Leslie Morton's exercises in people's history and Hill's discovery, during his stay in Moscow in 1935-36 of what appeared to him a surprisingly flexible Soviet historiography, laid the basis for an aspiration to approach 'the great transition' afresh. Its first fruit, Hill's The English Revolution, celebrating 1640 as against 1688, may have been an exercise in vulgar Marxism, but it presaged one of the most creative bursts of collective historiographical energy we in this country have seen. The Historians Group of the Communist Party, and its members after their departures from the party, developed a rich historical vision embracing the revolutionary transition, class formation, imperialism, the people's history and cultural struggle. One of the many ironies to which MacLachlan points is that it was after 1956 that the agenda of the years 1946-56 began to be realised, that the group began to win the battle of ideas and still, despite the bruising experience of defection and recrimination, they remained remarkably loyal to the ideals of their youth. By the early 1970s they were one of the dominant forces in academic and popular history.

4. The irreducible assumptions with which they operated might be reduced to were four: that there was a revolutionary nexus for the great transition from feudalism to capitalism; that there must be a social key to explaining the timing and substance of that revolutionary transition; that the outcome of that transition was a capitalist order, still with us and incapable of delivering social justice; and, finally, that the people were not merely passive victims of these historical processes (though victims they were) but had their own history of struggle which contained the seeds of an alternative society. These have been, and remain, the foundations upon which Hill and his colleagues have built their fabrication of the English Revolution. To withstand the inroads of historical scholarship, changing intellectual fashion and the transforming context of present politics the edifice has had to be remarkably amenable to reconstruction. MacLachlan tells the story of this refurbishment and remodelling - the changing of materials, the shifting of perspectives, the rescheduling of functions - with a trenchant wit, relentless vigour and an impressive command of the secondary literature. It is a tale at once inspiring, comic and tragic. In its course the causal explanation of the English Revolution moved from the 'hard' social factors of economic change and class struggle to the 'soft' ones of culture and discourse. A bourgeoise class was transformed from being the cause to becoming the consequence of the Revolution. That watershed itself moved from 1640 to 1647-50, to 1688, to the century of Revolution, to somewhere between 1529 and 1725. The more the Revolution was extended to a protracted series of adjustments, the harder it became to rescue it from the liberal gradualists or the right wing exponents of the durability of the ancien regime. So too, the emphasis on cultural materialism, ideas and words, entangled the argument in linguistic context and John Pocock's 'great arch' looked decisively unrevolutionary. MacLachlan deals with all of this, the arguments from the left as well as the right, in detail, with subtlety and a blend of the acerbic and the sympathetic. He ends ith a moving tribute to Hill whose quest was, he believes, neither ignoble nor unproductive. 'For over fifty years it challenged, provoked, stimulated and even uplifted other labourers in the vineyard. Is it reasonable to ask for more?'

5. Fair this may be but, by the time MacLachlan says it, the damage has been done. As he shows, there is much to learn from the history of these historians, their achievements and ultimately their failures. It is time to absorb the lessons and move on. MacLachlan has done a great service in providing a critical study on the basis of which this painful process might begin.

J. C. Davis
University of East Anglia