HOW IT ALL BEGAN: A FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY
Marion Kozak

Please also see Thirty Years of The Socialist Register by Ralph Miliband, from SR 1994.

The Socialist Register was conceived on an exceptionally sunlit Sunday, April 7 1963, over lunch. Sitting round the table were John Saville, Lawrence Daly, Edward Thompson, Ralph and I. To an outsider it was evident that Lawrence Daly in some ways dominated the group. Daly, who had once been a working miner in Fife and later became a trade union leader, had been part of John and Edward’s circle in the course of their break with the Communist Party in 1956-57 and after, and they considered him a most remarkable working class intellectual. He had attracted considerable attention in the 1959 general election campaign when he had beaten the official Communist candidate into third place in Willie Gallagher’s old constituency – a traditional stronghold of Communism. But what sticks out in my memory is not the politics but that Edward wanted to talk to him about poetry and that the afternoon concluded with a discussion about Shakespeare’s sonnets which Lawrence had been reading.

About SR

“The intellectual lodestone for the international Left since 1964”, Mike Davis

“Compulsory reading for people who refuse to be resigned to the idea that there can be no alternative to our unacceptable society”, Daniel Singer

“Socialism has always been about democracy, human rights and internationalism…that faith is what has characterised the work of the Socialist Register”, Tony Benn

The Socialist Register was founded by Ralph Miliband and John Saville in London in 1964 as an annual survey of movements and ideas in the particular historical context of the British New Left. Currently edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, with each annual volume constructed around a particular topical theme, it has consistently been committed to developing an independent relation to Marxism, free from sectarian and dogmatic positions.