Volume 36, Number 3 · March 2, 1989
Tolstoy in Embryo
By Robert M. Adams
A Tinker and a Poor Man: John Bunyan and His Church, 1628–1688
by Christopher Hill
Knopf, 394 pp., $22.95
Christopher Hill, former fellow of All Souls and until recently master of Balliol College at Oxford, the author of twelve influential and valuable books on the history of the seventeenth century, is well known among contemporary historians. He has made no secret of his philosophical premises, which are Marxist in the full-blooded populist British tradition (as distinguished from the abstract, highly dialectical strain most often encountered in American universities). Over the years Hill has not been without his opponents and detractors, but he is a prodigiously well-informed as well as a vociferous man; and he has persuaded enough disciples and silenced enough doubters so that it is really not inaccurate to refer to the age of the Puritan revolution and Civil Wars in England as 'Hill's half century.'
Review, 2923 words
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