'[Emrys Hughes] read the social history of Macaulay, Froude, and J.R. Green; Thorold Rogers's Six Centuries of Work and Wages particularly appealed to him because it offered "not the history of kings and queens, but of the way ordinary people ha struggled to live throughout the centuries..." Hughes was one of those agitators who found a virtual Marxism in Thomas Carlyle. The French Revolution inspired the hope that a popular revolt somewhere would end the war...'