Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast way this week is a historian. In 1941 at the age of 17, he left his academic studies in Cambridge to join the army and fight the forces of fascism.

He became a communist but left the party after the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Nevertheless, he's remained a true English socialist,

the founder of the magazine which became the New Left Review, and an early

and constant supporter of CND.

His most famous book is The Making of the English Working Class, a title which reveals a little of its author,

an academic and a thinker too, someone who enjoys using history to try to tell us something

about our future. He is EP Thompson. Have you

also perhaps enjoyed Mr Thompson making history as well yourself?

Yes, not as successfully as I'd have liked to have done. I mean it's always

being taken out of one's hand. If you ever do succeed in making anything, someone else

claims that it was their idea and takes it off you.

I mean in a certain sense, I think some of the gains that have been made towards peace recently are partly the result of the

pressure of peace movements but no one will admit it. But have you enjoyed that

aspect of your career or has it been just very hard work?

No, I've enjoyed it very much and I don't mind hard work.

Hard work is part of my nature, I think.

But how different I wonder would your life have been, had there been no cold war? Oh, I do resent the months and years sometimes

plowed into this sort of activity with very little result showing itself. I don't wish that I hadn't done

it, I would have still done it, but I do resent the loss of time and there's a loss of

...