I've got my five copies...

The New History Lab is featured in today's Independent. The article is online here, but do buy the paper if you can. The full-page picture of the steering committee is worth the cover price by itself...

Tristram Hunt's new book

Tristram Hunt, our final guest speaker, has a new book out: The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels.

The Lab and this blog are supposed to be on official hiatus over the summer before we return, bigger and better, next year, but I thought I'd take the time to link to some book reviews, in return for his excellent lecture.

• 'The Frock-Coated Communist brings Engels out from under Marx's shadow. That is the book's importance. Its attraction, as whoever chose the title realised, lies in the description of his origins and lifestyle.' (The Guardian)


• 'Indeed, as an old libertarian Marxist myself, it is a pleasure to see Engels portrayed here as the antithesis of the miserabilist misanthropy that often passes for being left wing today.' (The Times)


• 'This is a an intensely enjoyable book, full of arresting vignettes and thought-stirring insights, but it deserves to be read for the vivid picture it paints of 19th-century ideas and politics rather than for any of the claims it makes for Engels.' (The Independent)


• 'Hunt writes of “the carnal delights” of Paris, where Engels had spent “his raffish days in boudoirs and brothels”, and even poor Marx is accused of “taking advantage” of the maid. This, though true, is not serious history but journalistic tittle-tattle. The best parts of Hunt’s book concern the evocation of London and Manchester, the subject of his earlier (and far better) book on Victorian cities, Building Jerusalem. Maybe he finds it easier to write about cities than about real people. ' (New Statesman)