Interesting. I always buy his books when I find them in second-hand bookshops even if I’ve got them myself and leave them at our Head Office for resale. But he’s only good when writing about the past but about anything after 1900. I think the reason he’s been labelled, rightly or wrongly, a “Stalinist” is not so much that he was a member of the CPGB but for his unwavering support for the USSR which I’d assumed was for its anti-fascist stance, i.e its stance against anti-Semitic Germany, a position taken by quite a number of Jewish people of his generation.