E. P. Thompson
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Edward Palmer Thompson (February 3, 1924 - August 28, 1993), was an English historian, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, in particular his book The Making of the English Working Class (1963), but he also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist as well as publishing one novel and a collection of poetry. He was one of the main intellectual members of the Communist Party who left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and he played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964-70 and 1974-79, and during the 1980s he was the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.
