‘Memory is, of course, a curious loop’
The Meddling Professor: Bernard Crick’s Active Defence of Politics
by Charlie Ellis
A few hours in an archive can only give you a glimpse of the person whose papers you are looking at. Even so, you can learn a surprising amount.
Professor Sir Bernard Crick (16 December 1929 to 19 December 2008) was a prominent British political theorist, academic and democratic socialist. He is best remembered for In Defence of Politics, first published in 1962 and republished in numerous editions, and for his biography of George Orwell, published in 1981. He also played a major role in shaping British public policy on citizenship education. Crick famously argued that “politics is ethics done in public” and championed a practical “politics of action” over abstract political ideology. Several of Crick’s essay collections were published by EUP.
As I have outlined in ‘The Meddling Professor: Bernard Crick’s Active Defence of Politics’, his engagement with politics extended far beyond his academic work. It was rooted in his belief that academics had a responsibility to improve the quality of public debate and to participate in it, rather than simply comment from the sidelines. They could, he believed, bring nuance, accuracy and perspective to political discussion in the media. Crick was a strong advocate of political writing for a general audience, rather than confining political thought to the narrower world of academia. In 1993, he launched the Orwell Prize to promote high quality writing on political themes, informed by academic insight without being suffocated by what he called the ‘internalised dialogues of the ivory tower’.
As well as my article on Crick in Scottish Affairs, I have written about his journalism, while his advocacy of the ‘learned essay’ features in another of my articles. I plan to continue exploring his life and thought, including through interviews with people who knew or worked with him and through further research in his archive. Only recently, I spoke with former Labour MP and Edinburgh Council Leader Mark Lazarowicz, who recalled how Crick had supported him amid the bitter factional divisions that beset the party during the 1980s.
An Archive with an Order Beneath It All
I spent a morning with Bernard Crick’s papers at Birkbeck in the winter of 2025. We have several people to thank for the existence of such a comprehensive and well-ordered archive. His sons kept the papers, the archivist Sandra Marsh did the initial sorting, and Sarah Hall, as Birkbeck’s archivist, now oversees the collection. Hall enjoys talking to visitors and finding out what has brought them there. Many more people, in fact, come to look at the papers of the scientist David Bohm, which share the same room. Recently she has had a lot of Japanese visitors, perhaps connected in some way to a particularly turbulent period in Japanese politics.
We should also give Crick some credit. Unlike many academics and intellectuals, he kept his papers in a generally ordered way, in filing cabinets. I remember visiting him in his final year. He had mentioned an article from 1970 (on Buckingham University) that was of interest to me, so I asked whether he had a copy to hand. He knew that he did: ‘it’ll be somewhere in my files’. Finding it was another matter. His basement flat was packed with books and documents, and it would take him some time to put his hands on it. I wasn’t surprised. But there was clearly an order beneath it all.
Perhaps that order came partly from Crick’s habit of regularly narrating his own life. That would have required him to go back to old documents and earlier writings. His work is often self reflective too, full of personal asides and thoughts about the way the personal and political fit together. The archive raises another issue that becomes more obvious the longer you spend with it. What will historians actually have to work with in the future? Reflecting on Joanna Bourke’s history of Birkbeck Sarah Hall outlined that someone writing a history of Birkbeck a hundred years from now would “find it much easier to get hold of material from the twentieth than twenty first century”. Bourke had been able to rely on a substantial physical archive, something which is no longer growing as most university business is carried out electronically.
Much of Crick’s career unfolded before the computer became ubiquitous, with his work largely produced on a typewriter. Reflecting on his writing process, he once remarked that the transition from typewriter to computer in the 1990s had, in fact, slowed him down.The physical evidence is therefore considerable. What is largely missing is his email correspondence from the late 1990s onwards, which presumably became his main mode of communication. Significant emails relating to publications and talks were printed out. More general correspondence was not, at least not in anything like the same quantity. That everyday correspondence might have told us something important about Crick in his final decade. Presumably much of it is now sitting on the hard drives of the people he corresponded with, assuming it has survived at all. It’s an issue that will confront historians and biographers everywhere as more of the twentieth century disappears from paper.
The Business of Writing
The sheer quantity of writing is probably the first thing that strikes you in Crick’s papers. Writing was almost a natural reflex for him, something he used to work out what he thought. “I usually can only think in the act of writing.”
The drafts bear this out. He revised heavily and kept trying to get his arguments into sharper shape. He was clearly never fully satisfied. Articles and essays appear in several forms, with the argument changing as it went. His essay on moderation and ‘evolutionary socialism’ survives in at least four published versions. In Defence of Politics was treated in much the same way. Each new edition acquired a new postscript or ‘footnote’ (actually essays in themselves), responding to critics and modifying and clarifying parts of the argument.
Looking at the drafts gives you a feel for the actual business of writing. They are covered in annotations and revisions. Some passages are crossed out. Others are written into margins or added on separate pieces of paper, stapled onto the original manuscript. This connects with Lewis Minkin’s observation in his minor classic Exits and Entrances: Political Research as a Creative Art: “behind…every finished product, there are 100 flawed, adjusted and at times wasted efforts”. Minkin sometimes described the experience of seeing a published article almost as if he were looking at a doppelganger’s work. He found it hard to comprehend the logical, concise published text with the messy reality of the research and writing process. Comparing Crick’s drafts with the clean published text gives you much the same sensation.
It seems that Crick began typing up his thoughts quite early on rather than first writing a neat handwritten draft. But, wasn’t starting completely from scratch each time. Instead, he kept returning to ideas he had already thought about, reusing phrases, examples, and arguments. He was always reworking and rearticulating what some of the core themes of politics like liberty sovereignty freedom and democracy meant to him.
He also didn’t waste much paper. Some of the sheets he typed on had already been used for something else. Old examination papers and journal articles turn up on the reverse, helping the reader pin down where and when the writing was done. The typewritten material shows the writing process more clearly than a document on a computer ever could. You can see where something has been added or removed. New passages were often sellotaped, stapled or glued onto the original. Literally cut and paste, decades before the word processor gave the phrase its familiar meaning.
The drafts are messy and untidy. Some have multiple coffee or tea stains. These small details tell you something about how he worked, particularly when combined with what his son Tom has recalled about the newspaper articles. Those were often “typed up furiously, and sometimes hand delivered to the relevant editor”.
I had hoped to find very early drafts of In Defence of Politics, but the earliest surviving version, marked “Prelim 7”, is already “a pretty good full version”. It is still interesting to see the evolution of a text. A famous work that exists in published editions and is so widely cited is, in the archive just a bunch of yellowing, slightly torn pages.
The manuscript is 186 pages of B5 sized paper and is pretty close to the final text, although virtually every page includes annotations and corrections. The files relating to In Defence of Politics also contain proof copies, reviews and notes relating to later editions, which emerged partly because of the praise the original received.
The Lives Crick Might Have Led
Crick also had some idea of the lives he might have led instead. He described himself as potentially “an actor turning into a producer, a playwright or novelist, an editor of a South African newspaper in the 1960s or 1970s (with a British passport)”. Those alternative lives never quite happened, but parts of them survived in the life he did lead. Theatre turns up in his reviews for THES, while his public performances had an air of theatricality about them. He wanted to write with flair and cared about the quality of other people’s writing too.
Tom Nairn was one of his targets. Crick complained that Nairn’s rather dense prose kept him from having as much influence on public debate as he believed he should have. As Stuart Ball pointed out in the collection he edited of Crick’s contributions to Political Quarterly, there’s a bit of irony in that because Crick’s own writing had its quirks too, especially his habit of slipping in asides in parentheses. He didn’t always live up to his own wish to communicate clearly. Some of his work can be hard to absorb or to fully understand. His tendency to make unreferenced allusions to classical texts and historical events, which not all readers would be familiar with, only added to the difficulty. Sometimes his effort to strip away the ‘scholarly apparatus’ could frustrate readers who were eager to trace his sources.
The journalistic streak was never let go of. He noted that he enjoyed journalism, probably more than any other form of writing. Looking back, though, he also thought it had possibly taken up too much of his time and had contributed to a series of unfinished projects.
History as a Way of Thinking
History was another constant. In the introduction to his unfinished manuscript on The Four Nations, Crick wrote: “I am a political theorist and political writer who has always believed in the primacy of historical explanation”.
His final unfinished work was very much a book of history. The Four Nations, also sometimes called The Tale Of Four Nations, was planned as a substantial work of 31 chapters, with contemporary debates forming only a small part of the overall project.
Very little drafting had actually been completed by the time of his death. Only two draft chapters seem to survive, a fairly lengthy introduction and a chapter on Northern Ireland. The others largely exist as bunches of cuttings and articles that he presumably intended to use. The files also suggest that he planned to incorporate parts of longer review essays on works dealing with the four nations, including Krishan Kumar’s The Making of English National Identity. A long list of overdue interlibrary loans from the Woodrow Wilson Centre Library gives another glimpse of his research. He was reading widely.
One letter in the archive is particularly revealing. A friend had sent Crick a paper on “Scotland, India and Empire” from Past and Present. He had found it “sereddipically”. He hoped “it might have one or two truffles for your masterpiece”. The correspondence in the Four Nations files also shows that the project had attracted the interest of Oxford University Press. His book proposal was sent out to a number of readers in 1998. The OUP editor was less interested in a proposed collection of essays, although those essays would later be published by Edinburgh University Press- as Crossing Borders.
Perhaps Crick simply put too much pressure on himself by committing to such a substantial book. Most of his later work was in essay form, and that may have been the form that suited him best. He was also working extensively on citizenship, while his long dispute with prostate cancer took away much of the time he needed to complete a project of this scale. There may also have been a problem with the sheer amount of material he had accumulated. The folders of cuttings and the long reading lists suggest that he had too much to draw into a coherent narrative. He may have moved away from one of his most useful habits, essaying his ideas before trying to turn them into major works.
He did write and lecture on some of the contemporary aspects of the project. His piece in Political Quarterly and Scottish Affairs on ‘The Four Nations: Interrelations’ came out of his Mackintosh Memorial Lecture and fed into his wider journalism. In his last years he was also given the job of completing a history of Political Quarterly. As with The Four Nations, only fragments of the project were completed. In one of my final email exchanges with Crick, we discussed the possibility of my assisting with the work. He subsequently acknowledged, however, that ‘I have changed my mind on the history of the PQ, at least for this year and season’. By then, his prostate cancer had deteriorated significantly, and he died just seven weeks later.
Even so, history was clearly central to the way Crick analysed politics. Virtually every piece he wrote, or talk he gave, contained references to historical parallels and antecedents. It was one reason his essays and journalism have depth and lasting value. They aren’t simply records of the moment in which they were written. His journalism was, in some ways, two pronged. He brought together his understanding of political theory with his familiarity with history. That combination also explains why he encouraged academics to take part in public debate. He thought they could help raise the level of public debate; not leave it to the professional controversialists and pundits.
Beyond the University
More generally, he wanted to bridge what he called the “tragic chasm” between the academic study of politics and the real world. This comes through particularly strongly in a lengthy letter of advice, “The letter of an obscure man”, to an acquaintance called Joe. Having studied law, Joe seemed to be considering academic work in the social sciences. Crick’s final piece of advice was simple: “talk to all sorts of people about their ordinary, lively, muddle concerns, in between reading plenty of good books”. The point is clear enough. Don’t become so academic that you lose contact with the world beyond the university. Crick repeatedly worried that academic approaches to politics could miss things that were obvious to people living through them.
One section of the archive I found particularly interesting is a series of largely unpublished draft essays written in America and after his return. They include an account of his tribunal as a conscientious objector. Some of these pieces have the flavour of a travelogue. They give the impression of Crick trying to absorb what he had seen and learnt as he moved around the country. They also show his habit of thinking through writing, with new themes and half formed ideas appearing as he bashed away at the typewriter.
The subjects are all over the place. One piece on the “Grand ole opry” in Nashville begins with “Hillbilly music” before political themes emerge, with Crick commenting on anti socialist sentiments within the country music world. Another piece, “Political tradition and the psycho analytic normal”, looks at Freudian themes. A rejection note from the Spectator for one article, “The Drive In Cathedral”, is a useful little reminder that everyone has things rejected, even those who later become big names in their field. The range is striking. One box can contain political essays alongside articles on Harold Pinter for THES, followed by pieces on drug addiction and pornography. Crick’s interests didn’t fit especially neatly into categories.
There is something similar in the memoir material. Aspects of his life are present in his writing, which does not hold to a clear delineation between academic interests and normal life. His earliest years are described in “Memoirs of an academic life”, a polished fourteen page essay covering his childhood. It contains one of my favourite lines in the archive: “Memory is, of course, a curious loop”.
He writes about his efforts to deal with a stammer, something he was never quite able to shake off. In his later years, this perhaps contributed to the impression of him as a slightly dotty old Professor. There are also some wonderfully ordinary memories. “I can’t even remember if I was happy at school”. One childhood incident is particularly strange. Crick used his pocket money to pay a girl to take down her knickers, then had to lie to his parents about what the money had been spent on. As he later put it: “In my idealistic manhood I came to associate lying with sex”.
Those details don’t really explain Crick. But they do add something to the picture of the person who comes through from the archive. The books, essays and journalism show us the political theorist and public intellectual. But the papers reveal a different side; there’s the man surrounded by old exam papers, half-finished projects, coffee-stained drafts, and rejected articles. That’s one of the joys of exploring an archive. It’s not just about the polished finished work; it’s about seeing how it all came together; and sometimes, how it didn’t.
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