Thompson, Edward Palmer (1924—93) British Marxism cultural historian and nuclear disarmament activist. Born in Oxford to parents who were Methodist missionaries, he went to high school in Bath and university at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. During World War II he served in a tank corps in Italy. At Cambridge he joined the Communist Party and in 1946 together with Christopher Hill, Hobsbawm, Eric, and Rodney Hilton, formed the Communist Party Historians Group, which established its own highly influential journal Past and Present. It was the publication in 1963 of The Making of the English Working Class that brought Thompson widespread recognition as one of the key intellectuals of the time. Like Hoggart, Richard’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Williams, Raymond’s Culture and Society (1958), The Making of the English Working Class set aside the old model of culture which ignored the daily lives of the labouring classes in favour of the pronouncements and peccadilloes of the aristocracy, as though to say it is only kings and queens who have culture and make history. It was for this reason, despite its focus on seventeenth-century Britain, that Thompson’s work proved to be of enduring interest to Cultural Studies, which is similarly interested in everyday life. In the 1970s, having moved from Cambridge to Warwick, from which he famously resigned in protest at what he saw as its commercialization, Thompson made his living as a freelance writer, producing short works on a wide variety of historical and contemporary topics. He found true notoriety in 1978 with the publication of The Poverty of Theory, a blistering, albeit misdirected and intemperate, attack on theory, and particularly on its then leading exponent Althusser, Louis. Anderson, Perry wrote an equally scathing reply, Arguments within English Marxism (1980), demolishing virtually every one of Thompson’s points. From 1980 on, Thompson devoted his attention and energy to the nuclear disarmament movement, writing countless polemical pieces attacking the militarist ideology.