Edward Palmer Thompson (1924-1993) was a historian probably best known for his work The Making of the English Working Class, which included his reassessment of the Luddite movement. He published many other histories besides, one novel, and poetry that was only published after his death. He also wrote an influential biography of William Morris, although the first edition (1955) was largely ignored at the time, due to Thompson's then unfashionable Marxist viewpoint.

Thompson was born in Oxford, to Methodist missionary parents. During World War II he served in a tank corps. in Italy, and then studied at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, where he joined the Communist Party. In 1946 he formed the Communist Historians Group along with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton and others. This group launched the influential journal Past and Present in 1952. Thompson left the Communist Party in disgust at the USSR's invasion of Hungary in 1956 and amidst the first revelations of the atrocities of Josef Stalin. He remained what he called a 'socialist humanist', however, and with a group of fellow-thinkers of the New Left, including John Saville, published a journal, New Reasoner, that sought to develop a subtle, humanist socialism to counter the 'official' Marxism of the Communist and Trotskyist parties. The New Reasoner eventually combined with the Universities and Left Review, to form the influential New Left Review - the editors of which (including Marxist rival, Perry Anderson) Thompson was however in bitter dispute with.

He left academia in 1971. In 1978 he published The Poverty of Theory, which attacked the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser.

During the late 1970s he acquired a large public audience as a critic of the then Labour government's disregard of civil liberties, and from 1980 he was the most prominent intellectual of the renewed movement for nuclear disarmament. In Britain, his pamphlet Protest and Survive, a parody on the government leaflet Protect and Survive, played a major role in the rebirth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Thompson was, with Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and others, an author of the 1980 Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, calling for a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal, which was the founding document of European Nuclear Disarmament - confusingly END was both a Europe-wide campaign that comprised a series of large public conferences and a small British pressure group. Thompson played a key role in both END and CND thorughout the 1980s.

Thompson married Dorothy Towers (1923- ), a fellow left-wing historian, in 1948. She has contributed major studies on women in the Chartist movement, and of Queen Victoria (subtitled 'Gender and Power'), and was Professor of History at the University of Birmingham.

Key Works

• William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1st ed. 1955, revised 2nd ed. 1976).
• The Making of the English Working Class (1963).
• Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, (1977).
• The Poverty of Theory, (1978).
• Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, (1991).
• Making History: Writings on History and Culture, (1994).
• Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, (1993).
• The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age, (1997).
• The Sykaos Papers (Science fiction, 1988).
• The Collected Poems (Poetry, first pub. 1999).