`The Lost World of British Communism’ is a vivid account of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Raphael Samuel, one of post-war Britain’s most notable historians, draws on novels of the period and childhood recollections of London’s East End, as well as memoirs and Party archives. He evokes the world of British Communism in the 1940s, when the movement was at the height of its political and theoretical power, and raises prophetic questions about socialist motivation, collective identity, and historicizing the Communist past.