The Guv'nor: the Place of Ross McKibbin in the writing of British history

This chapter surveys the work of Ross McKibbin. Among these are four essays on the themes of ‘Social class and social observation’ (1978), ‘Working-class Gambling’ (1979), ‘Work and hobbies’ (1983), and ‘Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?’ (1984); The Ideologies of Class (1990); Classes and Cultures (1998); and the 2008 Ford Lectures, now published as Parties and People: England, 1914–51 (2010). It argues that Ross's work will long continue to be read because it embraces an unprecedented range of the life and activities of the ‘ordinary man’; it combines the most generous human sympathies with a stringent intellectual discipline; and it embodies a radical and novel conceptualization of the recent past, so that we retain a rich sense of the present as part of an ongoing history, in defiance of the attempted repudiation of that past by our political ‘masters’ today.