My short, bitter-sweet marriage to the radical historian Raphael Samuel

In a telling moment early on in A Radical Romance, Alison Light admits that she once identified with the character of Jo March, the tomboy in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Jo, it will be recalled, is the sister who marries a professor, years older than her, a German immigrant called Friedrich Bhaer, who is tender and warm and encourages her writing. In many ways it’s a model modern partnership.

Light found her own professor in the shape of Raphael Samuel. In 1987 she married him, following a whirlwind courtship. He was in his early fifties, from a Jewish communist family that traced its roots back to Russia and Eastern Europe. A self-declared communist from the age of eight, Samuel had left the party in 1956 after the revelations of Stalin’s crimes and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He went on to become a charismatic figure on the British left. As a founder of the History Workshop, he was an influential historian, committed to the idea of a people’s history, or ‘history from below’.

Light was 20 years his junior. ‘A Portsmouth girl’ from a working-class family, she’d voted for Mrs Thatcher in 1979 out of feminine solidarity. Although she had reverted to Labour, her politics were still largely ‘untheorised’, social rather than ideological. On the verge of an academic career, her life kept stalling and stopping. Her mind, ‘if not unmoulded, was not yet set’. If Raphael Samuel hadn’t existed, she writes, she would have needed to invent him.

They had been married for barely a decade when Samuel died from cancer in 1996. One of the remarkable things about Light’s book is that it is both a moving story of one particular love affair, with a heartfelt portrait of Samuel at its centre, and an illuminating narrative of wider appeal about the pitfalls of marriage — especially the pitfalls of marrying a much older partner — the devastation of loss, and the long drawn-out process of mourning that flows and ebbs, and suffers a sea-change, but never really ends.