Letter: Home-grown thoughts

NEAL ASCHERSON is overly pessimistic about the influence of right-wing 'white intellectual' emigres from Europe on the post-war intellectual climate in this country (25 September).

Not only was the new left of Perry Anderson and others influential once it set itself the task of bringing left-wing theory to this country in the 1960s, but there was also a group of home- grown leftist intellectuals whose influence was huge and whom Mr Ascherson ignores. I refer to those who came out of the tradition of the Communist Party Historians Group: Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, to name three.

George J Harney

London NW2