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Why were the security services so obsessed with the Marxist historian Christopher Hill?

MI5 and Special Branch intercepted Hill’s mail for decades, but the former Master of Balliol was an impartial teacher and certainly no Soviet agent

Marcus Nevitt
Christopher Hill in 1965, after the announcement of his appointment as Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Getty Images
EXPLORE THE ISSUE 22 February 2025
issue 22 February 2025

What did the great Marxist historian Christopher Hill think of orgies? Michael Braddick’s splendid and judicious biography doesn’t ponder this question. However, it strikes me as worth posing since, for a three-week period in the winter of 1978, an ensemble of actors (including the future Hollywood star Bob Hoskins) could be found naked at the National Theatre simulating group sex in Hill’s name.

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