I was a teenage Marxist

Bruce Anderson was bewitched by Marxism – until he saw the IRA at work in Northern Ireland

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Epidemic is a useful term, and not only in medicine. An infection that strikes suddenly and induces panic: that is a good way of describing other, non-medical diseases.

Today, we are in the grip of just such an epidemic: wokery. It too is inducing widespread panic while baffling many authorities who ought to know better.

But we have been here before. I remember. Back in 1968, I helped to spread an earlier plague: Marxism which, like wokery, was an international phenomenon. I remained a Marxist until 1972.

By coincidence, 1968/9 also saw a flu epidemic in the UK, and no one seemed to care. Most of the 30,000 fatalities were frail or elderly – or both. The rest of us just got on with life. In the case of adolescent Marxists like me, that often meant getting on with disturbing life.

The outbreak of Marxism struck as suddenly as COVID or wokery. It too caught the grown-ups by surprise.

Until that stage, Marxism had played only a peripheral part in British intellectual life. In France, it had come close to monopolising the social sciences. In the UK, though there were Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm, they never dominated their profession (nor, to be fair, did they try to).