"This book tells the story of the political and intellectual adventures of EP Thompson, one of Britain's foremost twentieth-century thinkers. Drawing on extrodinary new unpublished documents, Scott Hamilton shows that all of Thompson's work, from his acclaimed histories to his voluminous political writings to his littel-noticed poetry, was inspired by the same passionate and idiosyncratic vision of the world. In a narrative that moves from the battlefields of Spian and Italy to the coal towns of Yorkshire to the bloody chaos of Emergency India, Hamilton present Thompson as a man determined to fin an alternative, in though and in actio, to the ideolofies of Stalinism and right-wing 'Natopolotanism' that together dominated the postwar world...This book will appeal to scholars and general readers with an interest in left-wing politics and theory, British societym twentith-century history, modernist poetry and the philosophy of history" --P [4] of jacket