David McLellan

David McLellan interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 17th December 2012

0:05:07 Born in Hertford 1940; my mother came from a non-conformist, fairly well-off family in High Roding on the Cambridge-Essex border; her mother came from a similar family who had a chain of ironmongery shops in Liverpool; my grandfather was a quantity surveyor; my mother's maiden name was Bush, and her mother's was Eagle; my mother was one of eight children; her father married twice; he fell in love with the Liverpool lady and went up to ask for her hand in marriage; her father said that as she was his youngest daughter he needed her to stay to look after him in his old age; rebuffed, my grandfather went back to Hertford and married another woman; she died after bearing him four children and he then went up to Liverpool and asked again for the hand of his

first love; her father relented, they were married and had another four children, my mother being one of them; I think that sort of background influenced me, both the non-conformity and their Liberal politics; my mother used to take me, my brother and sister, to the Congregational church quite regularly every Sunday, so I was exposed to that form of Christianity from an early age and I think it had a profound and enduring influence on me which has not abated over time; that was my mother's major influence, apart from being a very sturdy, strong, unflappable kind of character; she died at ninety-six, coping with a couple of difficult years before her death very impressively; she had trained as a primary school teacher and worked for two or three years before she got married; thereafter she just kept the house; she did not read much beyond Reader's Digest, apart from the Bible, which she read a lot; she never pushed me academically

5:35:17 My father's family was Scots, and the McLellan clan belonged to the South-West of Scotland; his home town was Newton Stewart which is on the border between Kirkcudbrightshire and Wigtownshire; I can trace his family back to the late 1600s, and their profession was carters; they had a cottage in Newton Stewart which had outhouses for stabling, and that is still there and belongs to me now; this house was built in 1776 and all my ancestors ran this small carting business; for one reason or another the went out of business and my grandfather was just a land labourer with no land of his own; eventually he emigrated to England with his wife and children, including my father, and settled in Hertford; he ended up working for the council mending roads, so very poor; my father was one of six children but had an innate gift for classics; he won a place at the grammar school and then a scholarship to University College, London, and made an academic career for himself; he taught classics, but Latin was his main love; I don't think he ever published anything but he rose to be Reader in Classics at University College; he was not the sort of person who invited any sort of intimacy, so rather distant; I can't remember him pushing me at all; I was just very assiduous at school, and in a way I didn't need any pushing; at that time exams just seemed to happen; I got a scholarship to Merchant Taylors’ as a day boy, and I was very good in most subjects and did well at 'A' level; somebody must have suggested that I apply for a closed scholarship at St John's, Oxford, which were linked to Merchant Taylor's, where I eventually went; that seemed to be the way things were without any particular planning on my part, or my father's part; he may have had it in the back of his mind all along, but certainly didn't convey as much to me; he was naturally very pleased that his son was following his own footsteps, until I eventually abandoned classics for a quite different field

11:38:20 I think my earliest memory was being a very small child on Morecambe beach during the War; we were not exactly evacuated there but we moved there to escape the bombs nearer London; remember being on the beach and losing my teddy bear; remember being very upset about this because when we went back to look for it, the waves had come and washed it away; I did have one experience when I was six or seven, when we had gone as a family to Bexhill and Sandown on the south coast, and I contracted poliomyelitis; there was an epidemic at the time and it is water-born; I was shipped off to an isolation hospital at St Leonards-on-Sea; fortunately my polio was very mild and I was only kept there for about a month, and discharged with no permanent effects, but I was in a ward of adult men where I was the only child; a lot of these men were in pain, crying out at night, and also the animosity that some of them felt towards me as I was getting a lot of attention and presents, and nobody was paying any attention to them; I can't tell whether that left a permanent scar on my personality but it is a very vivid memory

14:50:21 I don't remember going to a kindergarten, but went to the ordinary State primary school at the age of five; I can remember feeling unhappy there, feeling ill, and being bullied; one reason why I must not have liked the school, and this is a vivid memory at about five, is having played truant for a whole day; I think I pretended to go to school, and walk up and down the road and round about, and eventually I was found out; my mother wrote a letter to the teacher that I was supposed to give her, but I didn't do so; instead of destroying the letter I kept it in my pocket and my mother found it; my vivid memory was my parents standing me in the fireplace, one on one side, one on the other, and both of them saying simultaneously, "David, we cannot trust you, can we"; I was very embarrassed by this episode and thus it sticks in my mind; after that, when we moved down to Oxheyt, near London, I went to a Preparatory school from about the age of eight to thirteen; it was just about half a mile's walk from our house; I think it was called Kingfisher; it is difficult, even in retrospect, to say whether it was a good school; I think it had some good teachers in it; it had a very good Latin teacher which was fortunate for me, who was the son of W.W. Jacobs who wrote these mystery stories such as 'The Monkey's Paw'; there were some bad teachers as well; I remember a French teacher who used to get drunk most of the time, sit on the desk, and tell us lewd stories about his girlfriend; he didn't last that long but should never have been hired in the first place; no, I don't think it was a very good school, but I was happy there and made friends, and I was good at school; I did have hobbies; I was quite keen on archery, but between eight and ten my passion was collecting the tops of cigarette packets, not the cards; in those days they were multifarious and highly coloured; I would spend the time when walking on the pavement with my eye perpetually in the gutter looking for empty cigarette packets; I would stick them in album after album; I don't know why this particularly fascinated me, but it did; I would sometime swap them, but not much; there were not many people who were interested in this kind of hobby; unfortunately I no longer have the albums as there was a bad fire in my house about five or six years ago, and the room where they were was gutted; I am short-sighted and astigmatic and I got my first glasses when I was eight; I can remember having these glasses and going into the public library and finding it difficult to adjust my vision because of them; I did not like them at all; I did not like games much, particularly as the preferred game at Merchant Taylors’ was rugby football which I think is a violent and barbarous sort of pursuit; I was not very stocky so used to be put on the wing as I was a good runner, then these other hefty boys would bang me over, I really didn't like that; the only sport that I did like at school, latter on, was tennis, which was gentle and civilised

22:03:11 I did the common entrance exam and got a scholarship to Merchant Taylor's; I think that my father would not have been able to afford the fees; I started there at the age of thirteen; I liked the academic side of it because I was very good at it, and it is nice to be top of the form; we used to be ranked in seating so the top boy would be back left of the class, and the real dunce was right under the teacher's nose; I an another lad called Hans Price used to alternate positions at the top; I was good at every subject except for mathematics and physics, though I had been good at the former early on; the sporting side, which bulked quite large, as it does in those sorts of schools; the thing I really hated was the Combined Cadet Force; you had to appear every Friday dressed in army uniform with big boots and blancoed belt, then after school, spend a couple of hours marching up and down, learning to strip a Bren gun, and that sort of thing; I abhorred that; I wasn't pacifist, I just hated the authoritarian atmosphere, and thought the whole thing boring and rebarbative; on reflection now I suppose I should have had more pacifist ideas about this, but it wasn't that at all; it was just the whole ethos that I didn't like; I did three 'A' levels - Latin, Greek and Ancient History, though I must have done science 'O' levels; I remember the Headmaster, a man called Hugh Elder, because he used to take some of us classics' boys; he was quite a religious man and used to go through the New Testament in Greek with us; I remember being quite impressed his talking to us about Paul's Epistle to the Romans, for example; this is not classical Greek at all, and not an easy Greek, its demotic stuff, but that left a good impression on me; and also the teacher of English because he was extremely histrionic and when reading Shakespeare in class, he would take a part himself; I have a vivid memory of him taking the part of King Lear and howling away at the end; it was very impressive because he had a marvellous deep voice; I remember being in a school play which was 'Hamlet', and I was a churlish priest who refuses to bury Ophelia; towards the end of my Prep school I remember being in a small opera; it might have been a version of Gilbert and Sullivan, but I had quite a major part in this; it was just at the time when my voice was breaking; I had a very good voice before it broke, and won singing competitions in my school; on this occasion, my voice broke halfway through the practises and the teacher said I was hopeless; as it was too late to find anyone else I was told to go on stage with the book and just read it out; that for a young boy at that age was very embarrassing

28:22:15 Alas, music has never been a big part of my life, though I wish it had been; my father was not musical; my mother was pretty musical, played the piano, and sang in massed choirs; she would take me to the Albert Hall where all the choirs of Hertfordshire came to sing the 'Messiah' or 'Elijah'; I liked that very much, but it is largely because it has got words so I know what it is supposed to convey; I do loyally go to concerts where friends of mine are playing; actually my granddaughters are quite musical and I go along to their concerts, but alas when they start playing an orchestral piece, something without words, most of the time, unless I am familiar with it, my mind begins to wander after a couple of minutes, and I start thinking about something completely different; I listen to talk radio at home and never listen to music there; the only time I listen to music is when driving, but it is the sort of thing you get on Classic FM; I think the one art form that really does fascinate me is architecture, partly because you can admire it anywhere, and partly the historical questions, the social background of a building, that I find interesting; also something three-dimensional I can often find aesthetically pleasing; looking at King's College from here I can scarcely take my eyes off it

31:59:01 I don't think I was Confirmed as I don't think the sacrament exists in the Congregational Church; I thought the teaching of religion at school was abysmal, wishy-washy, liberal, don't really believe in anything kind of way; at the age of fifteen-sixteen, because of going to this Congregational church every Sunday, and sometimes on Sunday evening, the Congregationalists put a great emphasis on preaching, so the centre-piece of these services was the sermon; they were very good at it, and that preaching and the Bible readings, made a very strong impression on me; the vocational, moral side I thought was right, and was where I felt I belonged; I didn't think that I would end up as a preacher then; what I wanted to do at that time, and had virtually made up my mind to do, was to give away anything that I might have and go and help people in Africa; I was so decided about this that I made it clear that I did not want to take up my place in Oxford because I thought there were better things to do; I went to see the head of the Congregational Missionary Society in London; he said that I would be much more useful in missionary activities after getting an Oxford degree; I was persuaded by him

36:20:03 I went to St John's in 1958; my tutors were Sherwin-White for history, Donald Russell taught me Latin and Greek; I got a first in Part I; I remember the lectures of Isaiah Berlin, who was later my DPhil supervisor, and people used to flock to these lectures because they were so famous; his lectures were clear and pulled together various strands of history and social background; I remember the vivacity; he was an essayist rather than a writer of books; there was a man called Griffiths at Jesus who lectured very well on one of my selected topics, Juvenal; I wasn't an historian but I knew Keith Thomas; my two closest friends, who had both been at Merchant Taylors’, Cormac Rigby and Brian Harrison, were both pupils of Keith Thomas so I heard a lot about him from them; I wanted to become a Jesuit so had a two year gap after graduating, and went to France, tried to become a Jesuit, then came back to Oxford to do a DPhil; I only ever had a long conversation with Keith at Brian Harrison's house, when he asked me whether I wanted to write in a rival series to Fontana Modern Masters, on Immanuel Kant; I didn't think I was the right person to do so as I didn't much like Kant; I was never involved in politics at Oxford; I used to go to the Union quite regularly and listen to the debates which were mostly fairly political; during my first year I was not very sociable, probably slightly shy, so apart from going to tea with some of my friends I spent a lot of time working; this only stopped when I became a Catholic in my second year, and that became my window on the world and I began to join various Catholic societies, particularly one which was very engaged in Third World countries, giving technical assistance and that sort of thing; it was called Ad Lucem, and had been founded in Belgium but had a group in Oxford; one of the things that I liked about it was that it was full of foreigners which was a real eye-opener to me as I had had a very sheltered childhood; I did play a bit of tennis there, but that was all; I didn't have a girlfriend in my first year; I then fell in love with a German girl, but very platonically as at that time I wanted to become a Jesuit; I became a Catholic possibly by chance; I was a committed Christian and in Oxford there were many brands on offer, and we used to talk a lot about religion; I looked for a Congregational church and couldn't see one; one of my friends was very evangelical and took me to the City Church on the High, but I found it too loud for my liking; Cormac Rigby was a very strong Catholic and used to go to Mass at St Aldates at 7.15 every morning; I began to go with him, and that kind of thing just grows on you; partly because of the liturgy at that time, which was in Latin, it appealed to me; then for fairly intellectual reasons I thought that if you wanted to practice Christianity then it was better to go back to a founding form, rather than to one that had picked pieces from it, or a national church; I, like a lot of young people, was looking for something that was all-encompassing, a kind of way of looking at the world which was not an answer to everything, but was comprehensive; Catholicism did seem to me to be comprehensive; I was very interested in Thomism, Thomas Aquinas, and that kind of thing; all that seemed to me to have the answers to a whole lot of questions; I don't think the presence of Father Michael Hollings affected me directly; he was a man I very much admired, and to some extent got to know reasonably well; later on, the example of the way in which he conducted his life and dealt with the students, and his very practical charity, not just in Oxford but also in London, with his soup-kitchen church set-up, impressed me; the man who instructed me was his Assistant Chaplain, Yve Noel, who was a Belgium priest, and was much more buttoned-up, though I quite liked him; I am not sure at what point I decided to become a Jesuit, whether before or after I actually became a Catholic, but this was a continuation of my attempt to understand the meaning of life when I was fifteen or sixteen; I was looking for something that was a total dedication, a complete renunciation of the things of this world, and being at the service of other people as well as God; I became a Catholic in the first term of my second year, and for the next three years I was intending to become a Jesuit; I remember helping some of your colleagues, as well as Cormac Rigby, whose Latin was not brilliant, and Glyn Worsnip, who later became a comedian, and I also helped you

51:32:21 When I got my degree I decided to go to France because my parents strongly objected to my wish to become a Jesuit; I wanted to conciliate them in some way so agreed to go to France for a year to think it over; I got a job as a teacher of English conversation in a very posh Jesuit school; in France, those who wanted to go to the Grandes Ecole would do a year's preparation after leaving school; the boys who came to this school, which was just outside Versailles, were being groomed for the entrance examination; I was there to engage them in some English conversation; I divided my time between there and Paris; the school side I found very difficult because these boys were almost my age, and those who were destined for the Naval Academy were not interested in English; only those who wanted to do business or agriculture seemed to be interested; the only way that I could get their interest was to talk about politics; most of them came from very traditional conservative, Catholic, right-wing families; they hated De Gaulle, very pro Pétain and Vichy, and told me that the reason that the French lost the war was because the English ran away and scuttled at Dunkirk; I felt quite strongly about these matters, so we did then manage to get a bit of English conversation going; I still felt that I wanted to become a Jesuit, and after that year went back to England and joined the Jesuit novitiate; it was in a huge Victorian pile, built by a man who had made his money out of beer, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, called Harlaxton Manor; the novitiate was in the servants' quarters and part of the rest of the house was occupied by some very old Jesuits who were being looked after in these magnificent rooms; the essence of the training which lasts for two years is not intellectual; there is a lot of praying and a famous thirty-day retreat which St Ignatius Loyola instituted for all his followers; there was also a lot of manual labour, peeling potatoes and digging the garden, and that kind of thing, and a lot of learning about the history of the Jesuits and their attitude to various things; there were lectures given by the Novice Master, who seemed to me to be not an intellectual man at all; he had been Prefect of Discipline at Stonyhurst, the Catholic Public school in Lancashire, and I thought that role just about suited him; there was not a lot of training; initially I took to it as I am quite obstinate and had made up my mind to do it, and stuck to it through thick and thin until the truth stared me in the face; the Jesuits have changed a lot since then, but then they recruited children from northern Catholic grammar schools on the whole, who came straight into the Novitiate; three of us were graduates, one in his thirties from America, a very gifted man though quite an egotist, but we three stuck out a bit like a sore thumb and we actually left almost at the same time because it was so inflexible and unimaginative; I remember reading before I went into the Novitiate, a book by a man who had been a Jesuit before the First World War, and had left during the war to fight; his account of the Novitiate over fifty years earlier showed that it hadn't changed at all; I think that after getting a university degree it is difficult to adapt; my decision to leave was very sudden; I remember sitting in the library, looking out of the window, it was snowing, and thinking to myself that I didn't need to be there and that there was an alternative; as soon as I felt that I decided to leave; I think my decision are often like that; I remember thinking when my marriage broke up, the same kind of thing; I think it is part of my obstinacy and a certain amount of inflexibility, that I can't imagine things being otherwise until they have got to be otherwise; that makes for something that is very sudden and not a gradual process at all; I think that if it had been different then, and more like it is now, I might still be there; it is not impossible

Second Part

0:05:07 After making my decision I think I must have contacted my father, because he came to bring me certain things to go out with, and about three weeks after that I left; together with one of my colleagues who had a degree, we went and stayed in a hotel in Grantham before catching a train down to London; I remember an incident in this hotel, that is, when we wrote home which we were allowed to do once a week, we had to leave the letters unsealed so that the Novice Master could read them; I had written one or two letters, and I gave them to the porter in the hotel asking him to post them; he turned them over and noted they were unsealed; I don't think I realized the sense of loss at the time; I felt the same as I later thought when my marriage failed and I got divorced; I didn't realize at the time the shock and disappointment, but it was, and similarly with the Jesuits; I thought it was partly because I wanted to pursue my studies and do a DPhil, and I got a place at Oxford to do that, but because I had got six months between then and starting at Oxford in September, I thought I would go to Germany because of the topic that I wanted to study - Marx and so forth; I stayed in a tiny little flat in Frankfurt, learnt German and went to a few lectures, and met people like Adorno, so it was interesting in that way; but I think, looking back on it, I was quite depressed during that time; I wasn't very sociable; I would spend as much time as possible sleeping which is a good indication of somebody who is depressed; it was not a happy time for me, and was due to the shock and disappointment of having had to revise all my ambitions which I had held for three or four years, which is quite a long time at that sort of age; I think it took me about eighteen months to get over that

3:46:14 Before I went to the Jesuits I spent a year in France and really wanted to study something there that was typically French; I thought I would look at existentialism but realized that it did not have a very solid form; the Summer before I had been on a National Union of Students' trip to Moscow; the reason I had been was that my friend, Brian Harrison, had been on just such a trip the year before, and had encouraged me to go; I hitch-hiked all the way to the Russian border, climbed on the train, and had various escapades because I didn't have a proper visa; anyway, got there in the end and found it interesting, and these people were talking about Marxism; I had never heard about Marxism before and wondered what they were talking about; it seemed to be important to them, and the fact that two Jesuits had written very good books on Marxism, one Jean-Yves Calvez, about Marx, and the other by Henri Chambre, which was more about the Soviet Union and China, and that kind of Marxism; anyway, French Jesuits had obviously got interested in the topic, and I was interested in left-wing attitudes to the world because the Ad Lucem people were left-liberal in their politics; the young French Catholics struck me at that time as sort of golden people because they had a very strong religious belief and they united this, which Catholics in England at that time simply did not do, with various social and political goals; I got interested in politics through them and decided to look at Marxism; I started to read bits and pieces and some of the bits of Marx that I read, particularly 'The German Ideology', where in a hundred pages he lays out what he called the materialist conception of history, of history moving in stages with an economic foundation, and this picture of the unrolling of history made a very profound impression on me; I thought it really made sense to me, it put history into a kind of perspective, with a thread running through, and a kind of explanation; therefore I thought that when I went back to Oxford I should pursue the matter; while I was in Germany I was writing to people in Oxford and trying to get a place; in those days, I think that if you got a place you got a scholarship, a State Studentship, which was possible to live on; when I was back in England I went round Oxford asking various people if they would supervise me; Alasdair MacIntyre was one, Pelchinsky was another, and then I went to see Isaiah Berlin; he had various suggestions that I didn't like, then he said that there was a man called Sydney Hook who wrote a book about Marx and his young Hegelian colleagues in the early 1840s of whom the best known is Feuerbach; Berlin thought this book was one-sided and suggested that I try and write a better book; I thought this a good idea so that was what I decided to do; the reason I wanted to do this was that I was very interested in theories about religion, particularly from a political-sociological point of view, and the whole notion of secularization; you can see Marx's relation to these young Hegelian colleagues as a successive series of rejecting first one, because he is too philosophical, and then another because he was too political, another was too sociological, thus getting right down to the materialist, economic, bit, the foundations of society, then you could start; that's the sort of secularizing process, and it was that sort of thing which interested me to see if I could get to the bottom of it; that is the topic I landed up with, and spent the next three years writing about in my thesis, supervised by Berlin; I hesitate to use the word supervised; Berlin was a very generous man but he didn't pay a lot of attention to the minute detail in a PhD thesis; I remember that the one chapter that he was really interested in was the relationship of Marx to a man called Moses Hess; Hess was an early Socialist and also an early Zionist; I went to see his grave not long ago, he is buried in Israel; as a proto-Zionist Berlin was very interested in him, and read this chapter very carefully, making notes; the rest of the thesis he would sort of read it; what he would do was to invite me to lunch in All Souls once or twice a term and talk to me about Freud, for example, which was nothing to do with my thesis, but he was a very attractive and generous man; when I applied for my first job he wrote a reference saying that McLellan was one of his best pupils; I subsequently learnt that he wrote the same letter for everybody, which I think is rather nice

12:55:09 In brief, my thesis was this, Marx produced his theory out of arguing with this successive band of young Hegelians; Sydney Hook's book said that Marx just saw through these people and sloughed them off; I wanted to show that Marx borrowed a lot from them, and they heavily influenced the way in which his thoughts evolved, and he had quite a strong intellectual debt to them which had not previously been recognised; I have never abandoned Catholicism so it was not a case of substituting one ideology for anther; if you are asking if Marxism appealed to be because of its all-embracing attempt to explain matters, I think that the answer is partly yes, but I am not in sympathy that there is some kind of parallel between Marx's way of looking at the world as an Old Testament Prophet, thus Marxism is a substitute for religion or a pseudo religion, largely because it is downgrading Marx's thought for which I have a lot of respect; that kind of attitude doesn't do him justice at all; with the view that what attracted me to that sort of thing, I think that the aspect of something all-embracing and encompassing, not explaining everything, but a broad sort of theory, yes it did; I still am attracted to Marx for that reason, though perhaps a bit less than then because I don't think it is so all encompassing, nor indeed do I think that Marx thought it was; Marx's later disciples, particularly Engels, the Bolshevik experience, and Soviet Marxism were often of that sort, which I don't think it was Marx's actual view

16:50:09 I got a job as a lecturer in politics at the University of Kent; these were the days when getting jobs like that was easy; I was asked to apply for this job by the newly appointed professor of politics, whom I did not know; as far as I remember there were not any other applicants; this was the time when numbers of new universities had been founded and they hadn't got anybody to teach in them as the supply of PhD graduates was only small; as I remember it, during my first term somebody came down from Blackwells and referred me to a series of texts on political theory that they had started, for example Hobbes's 'Leviathan' with Oakeshott's introduction, and did I have any ideas; I suggested the early Marx, and I did that; then Blackwells were treating me badly, and I had a colleague at Kent who had a literary agent, Michael Sissons of A.D. Peters; Sissons was one of the first people to see that money could be made from academic books and was recruiting academics; my friend suggested that I get his help; Sissons said that as the Blackwells contract was so far advanced he could only try to make it better; he asked me if I had anything else and I suggested my DPhil thesis, and he found Macmillan to take it just like that; at that time there were not a lot of people who were writing about Marx so I was able to carve out a kind of field, that is why some of these books made quite a strong impression in a way that they wouldn't if they were published now; there was also a very ready market at that time in all countries for books on Marx, and that went on into the middle 1970s; I had masses of students coming into my course on Marx, there were 40 or 50 students in that short period between 1968 and 1975; thereafter, they shrunk from 50 to about 10; during the golden period I got invitations to lecture in America and Australia, not France as I think they are quite insular about such things; it was also easy to write to a university and offer a lecture, and so do a tour that would be financed in this way; I went to America quite often; I once got a very good offer from the University of Phoenix in Arizona as a distinguished professor, at an enormous salary, but I didn't take it, partly because I don't like Phoenix, but mainly because I had small children and was divorced, so I couldn't have taken them with me; that was a much more important reason; my former wife came from Amiens and I was in Canterbury, so I could go and see them every fortnight, and they would come and stay with me during holidays

24:49:11 On my working methods, I don't think that ideas come suddenly to me, partly because of the nature of my work; a lot of it is expository and putting ideas together, comparing them maybe, but that is not the kind of work that some huge revelation can come; what I tend to do it to read quite a lot first, taking notes along the themes; for example, I wrote a book on ideology for the Open University Press, working out how to present it first, reading other people's work on the subject, making notes, then I would decide the structure, then I would do them chapter by chapter; I would make a thorough list of what I needed to read to deal with a particular chapter; I have never worked at a desk in my life, so would lie on a sofa with a writing pad propped up on my knees and scribble away making notes while reading from a pile of books beside me; I don't do it at a desk as I just think it is more comfortable lying down; thinking about a given chapter, I would decide on the themes which I wanted to deal with, a. to f., for example, and they would each take four or five pages; then I would go through the notes, and opposite each note, put a., b., c. etc; then I would go through all the ‘a’ ’s to start with, read them through and think about them; I might make a little schema of how I wanted to deal with those three or four pages, and then I would write it; but I think, or hope, that I must have done quite a lot of thinking before I started writing because I very rarely change anything I have written; I know most of my colleagues will say they have written a book three times in longhand, draft after draft; publishers no longer seem to ask for any revisions, but I do find that difficult because I construct my writing in a certain way and it is part of a whole; I write with a pen

29:52:13 Selecting three of the books I have written to take to a desert island, the first that would spring to mind would be my intellectual biography of Simone Weil because I think she is such an extraordinarily rich thinker, richer than Marx in some ways because she is wider; I would probably take the history of Marxism in the twentieth century, called 'Marxism after Marx', partly because it is quite wide-ranging, from Engels up to the present, and partly because it is quite fat; I have also done a lot of editions of Marx's works, and if one of those could be counted I would probably take that edition of the early writings of Marx because I think they are rich in the kind of humanism that they are propounding; when I started writing about Marx the picture people had of him was of somebody very closely tied the kind of dogmatic metaphysical materialism that came with Engels and was later taken up by the Soviet Union, so he was looked at either as an out-of-date, boring, economist, and/or somebody who propounded a kind of materialism which was rather simplistic; I don't think that is too much of a caricature of what most people would have said about him; I think I contributed to showing that Marx had a much richer origin of his thoughts, particularly in the early writings I have mentioned, where he could be portrayed as somebody who was a philosopher, a humanist, and had a theory of human nature and what made human beings flourish, that was up with the best of them, and fitted ill with some of the later interpretations of Marx; also by trying to show that some of the historical interpretations of Marx were much subtler than he had been given credit for, because people used to think of him as a very strong kind of determinist, and I wanted to show that his historical approach was a much subtler one than that; sometimes in particular instances, in the '1848 Revolutions', but also in his general theory

34:00:02 I have been going to China for the last twenty years; it does not throw any light on my reflections about Marx particularly, except to the extent that certain traditions of thought, certain countries or organizations, can quote Marx in ways that seem rather surprising; I think that Marxism itself, as you get it from Marx, is not a very good approach for analysing non-capitalist societies; 'Das Kapital' is a critique of political economy which he saw as the ideology of capitalist society, and on that I think he is very good, but when it comes to even non-Soviet Marxists, people who are hostile to the Soviet Union, their Marxism is a feeble guide; the same thing is true for China; Mao had enormous trouble trying to marry Marxism with Chinese culture, but it is in that somewhat alien climate that Marxism is parachuted in; Mao did quite a good job in some of his writings on contradiction in trying to adapt Marx's views about the dialectic in historical progress to Chinese circumstances, it is not an easy thing to do; I can't think of any Chinese people who are thinking successfully about their country's progress in Marxist terms, so I think it's a very difficult thing to do; I don't think you can blame Marx for the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution; the problem for the whole history of Chinese Marxism is the attempt to create a socialist or communist society in what is basically a peasant society where you don't have a proletarian, working-class, base, which is one of the reasons why the Party floats above a lot of these things because they didn't have a base for which to be responsible because the working-class weren't there

39:04:03 I think I may have stopped writing things that are big and serious partly because I think the book on Simone Weil which I wrote a long time ago, as a major intellectual project she is such a striking thinker that she is almost an impossible act to follow; it is partly that I am occupied doing non-academic things such as looking after grand-children and all sorts of volunteer jobs which I really like doing, and seeing friends and travelling round the world; I used to enjoy writing, the actual craft of writing well and clearly, but it doesn't actually tempt me now to do so; it is strange isn't it, but I think that's a stage that I have passed beyond really; I am still a Catholic and in a way it means everything to me

41:40:06 Postscript. Simone Weil tried to marry her religious metaphysics with her theories about society, and I was interested in attempts to do that and wanted to follow through these attempts for people who tried to marry their political views with religious views, and specifically with Christianity; I gave a series of lectures in America on this theme; the simple question that I was interested in is the sort of people who say, if you are a Christian you must be a socialist, or maybe a conservative, though unlikely to be a liberal, anyway it is that kind of question, the way that people try to justify their political positions by appealing to certain religious values or positions or indeed metaphysics of one sort or another; its partly because I have been long interested in politics, and active in politics, having tried to stand as a city councillor, at the same time as being a very strong Catholic; so of course I necessarily think of these things together; I know that some people say that religion should not be mixed with politics but I think that a thoroughly erroneous position; maybe what I said was too blanket; I don't mean that there are not certain areas in which politics should be kept separate from religion; a contemporary example is all this stuff about gay marriage; I think the Government has really mishandled it by trying to tell the Church of England what it should and shouldn't do; there I think we do need a certain separation, but I think that as far as people do have composite views on such things, as I certainly do, it is very difficult to compartmentalize different parts of your personality and intellectual outlook, and I think deleterious as well - they fertilize each other, or should

[Added note by D.C. after the interview: “ I should perhaps add that in the early 1990s I studied to become a solicitor as I have always admired people who changed career in mid-life. I wanted to become an advocate for the poor and oppressed, and being a solicitor gives one some clout. To this end, I did an undergraduate law degree at my University (while working-full-time as a Professor), got a First Class LLB, and went on to do a postgraduate Legal Practice Course at the South Bank University. I fell at the last hurdle as I did not have time to do Articles and resigned my self to working as a volunteer for the Citizens Advice Bureau”.]