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The historian Raphael Samuel (1934-96) has once more been recognized as a significant figure within his discipline. Samuel's parting gift in the final year before his death, the Centre for East London History at the University of East London, was officially relaunched in September 2008 as the Raphael Samuel History Centre. As was mentioned in the initial reminiscences of Robin Blackburn, his colleague at the scholarly radical journal New Left Review (which had been founded with Samuel's help in 1960), Samuel's organizational activity as a collaborator was a powerful impetus in several practical ventures. Not only this: his critical personality as a scholar was a fundamental challenge to academic convention; his political voice as a conscience within the British left was a trenchant commentary on its changing preoccupations; and his historical writing on "progress, class formation and long, or short, revolution" was an important intervention not only in a political program but also in the grand narratives of modern history (133). Samuel was unconventional as a political historian. Among his eclectic range of sources were memoirs, which in the field of political history have sometimes been disregarded as secondary to "the records of the events themselves" (Elton 83). Samuel's attitude toward memoirs was distinct from the domestic reputation of the genre as the preserve of Home Counties drawing rooms (Gamble 35). Not only were memoirs a basis for his historical work on marginal lives, but also his autobiographical work was analytical rather than a chronicle from the cradle to the rocking chair.
In the 1980s, Samuel's writings were oriented toward personal politics. His autobiographical lifework was a sequel to his story of the gangster Arthur Harding, whose rise to prominence in the social networks of East London was transcribed from Samuel's tape-recorded interviews in East End Underworld (1981). Samuel's later residence in Spitalfields was close to Harding's stomping ground in Bethnal Green (East End Underworld 1), while his Jewish childhood in Hampstead Garden Suburb had been a counterpoint to his schoolboy membership of the Communist Party (CP) Historians' Group in Clerkenwell, and then, in the immediate aftermath of Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, his participation in the Oxford student culture at his college, Balliol, whose journal Universities and...