Review of Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian by Michael Braddick (Verso Books, 2025)
Christopher Hill is perhaps the only historian of seventeenth-century England to retain a popular readership over the last fifty years. Nor is anyone currently living likely to match that accomplishment.
Hill’s most famous book was The World Turned Upside Down, first published in 1972. It focused on the Interregnum, the period between the ouster of Charles I, who was subsequently executed, and the monarchist Restoration of 1660.
Yet Hill’s chosen subjects were not the elite reformers who anticipated the liberal, bourgeois, and parliamentary England that eventually prevailed in the 1688 Glorious Revolution. Instead, he concentrated on vanquished radicals: freethinkers who denied scriptural revelation, Levellers who urged a broad electoral franchise, Diggers who tried to implement primitive communism, and ecstatic Ranters who delivered shocking prophecies, sometimes in the nude.
The book is still in print. Moreover, many subsequent leftists have repurposed its title, drawn from an English ballad of the mid-1640s, and it has passed into the mainstream as a catchphrase for sudden, disruptive change. The socialist songwriter Leon Rosselson even converted Hill’s book back into a ballad — evidence that as well as being inspired by popular movements and culture, Hill could inspire them, too.
How did he achieve this enduring popularity? Hill wrote lively, intelligible prose and pioneered what came to be called…
Auteur: Raphael Magarik
