Radicals: A celebration of the life and work of Christopher Hill (1912-2003), with Professor Michael Braddick
Event details
Michael Braddick discusses his new book, Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian (Verso), with Laura Forster, Freya Sierhuis, and Laura Stewart.
Christopher Hill was one of the most prolific historical writers of the 20th century. The author of over a dozen books, and a huge corpus of articles and essays, Hill possessed the rare ability of being able to produce intellectually demanding scholarship while making history accessible to the public. In widely read studies such as The World Turned Upside Down, Puritanism and Revolution, and Milton and the English Revolution, Hill popularised the idea that the seventeenth century had been 'revolutionary'. Although Hill's Marxist frameworks and his methodology were subjected to sustained criticism, the creative richness of his work has continued to be admired. Hill's great skill lay in capturing for his readers what it was like for ordinary people not only to live through revolutionary times, but to be the ones making the times revolutionary. His love of the literature and poetry of the period infused his own writing and gave him an intellectual range that many contemporaries acknowledged they could not match.
Michael Braddick's luminous biography shows how Hill challenged established narratives and changed the way people understood English history. It also situates Hill's scholarship in the context of his own extraordinary times. In this round table event, Michael Braddick talks with Freya Sierhuis and Laura Stewart about Hill the radical scholar, who has given us one of the most vivid depictions of the English Revolution; and with Laura Forster on the contradictions of a life shaped both by the radical ideas of the twentieth century and by the trappings of establishment respectability.
Copies of Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian, published by Verso Books, will be available for purchase on the night.
About the speakers
Michael Braddick, FBA, FRHistS, formerly of the University of Sheffield, is Professor of History at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College. His many published works include The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution (2018), and God's Fury, England's Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (2008).
Laura Forster joined the Department of History in 2024. She has published on radical and socialist ideas in modern Britain and France. Her latest book is Friends in Common: Radical Friendship and Everyday Solidarities (2025).
Freya Sierhuis works in the Department of English and Related Literature, where she studies and teaches early modern literary and intellectual history. She has published widely on the Elizabethan polymath, Fulke Greville, and is currently researching a new book on The Arminian Controversy: Religion, Politics and the Stage.
Laura Stewart works in the Department of History. She has published widely on early modern Scottish and British history. Her books include Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637-51, which won the American Historical Association Morris D. Forkosch Prize in 2017.
Contact
Professor Laura Stewart