Ian Birchall

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Ian Birchall (born 1939) is a British Marxist historian, a member of the Socialist Workers Party and author of numerous articles and books, particularly relating to the French Left. Formerly Senior Lecturer in French at Middlesex University, his research interests include the Comintern, the International Working Class, Communism and Trotskyism, France and Syndicalism, Babeuf, Sartre, Victor Serge and Alfred Rosmer. He is on the editorial board of Revolutionary History, a member of the London Socialist Historians Group and is working on a biography of Tony Cliff.

Ian Birchall became infamous for a time in May 2006 for sending an offensive email to Polly Toynbee, The Guardian columnist.[1]

[edit] Selected articles/works

• France : the struggle goes on (with Tony Cliff) (1968)
• Lenin's Moscow, by Alfred Rosmer (translated [from the French]) (1971)
• Workers against the monolith : the Communist parties since 1943 (1974)
• The smallest mass party in the world : building the Socialist Workers Party, 1951-1979 (1981)
• Eric Hobsbawm and the working class (with Norah Carlin) (1983)
• Bailing out the system : reformist socialism in Western Europe, 1944-1985 (1986)
• Morris, Bax and Babeuf (1996)
• Flowers and revolution : a collection of writings on Jean Genet (edited with Barbara Read)(1997)
• The spectre of Babeuf (1997)
• Sartre against Stalinism (2004)
• The German Revolution, 1917-1923 / by Pierre Broué ; translated by John Archer (edited with Brian Pearce) (2005)
• A Rebel's Guide to Lenin' (2005)
• Writing Socialist Biography: Some methodologcal problems - the biography of Tony Cliff (paper) (2005)
• Sartre's Century (2005)