Born OTD in 1912, English Marxist historian and academic, specialising in 17th-century English history, Christopher Hill. Within the English revolution of the mid-17th century which resulted in the triumph of the protestant ethic – the ideology of the propertied class – there threatened another, quite different, revolution. Its success ‘might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political & legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church & rejected the protestant ethic’.

In ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, … More