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“... Writing about Basil Davidson’s work for the LRB blog a few days after his death last month, I’d a sense that there was more to say. The record is magnificent: his sterling work in occupied Yugoslavia for the Special Operations Executive during the war, his books about this period, and then, famously, the histories of precolonial Africa and the writings on the anti-colonial liberation movements ...”

“... Travelling in West Africa a little over forty years ago, Basil Davidson was shown around the chamber of the new territorial assembly in Bamako, built by the French as a concession to the growing demand for independence in Mali. The chairman of the assembly ‘pointed with a cautious smile to the plaster-white figure of the French state symbol on the chamber wall above his ceremonial chair ...”

“... but of the whole root and branch, the causes and the effects, of fascist ideology. As Mr Davidson says, ‘the true epic of those years lay in the courage and determination with which countless men and women followed the hope and vision of a radical democracy. Vaguely perceived perhaps ... and yet so real and so worthwhile, in the grim conditions of ...”

“... World War and forced labour continued to be used in colonial Africa well into the 20th century: as Basil Davidson discovered, it continued in Angola in the 1950s, and recent research shows that it may have been widespread as late as the independence wars of the 1960s.* The Angolan colony was key to propping up the struggling economy of the Salazar regime ...”

“... road to independence has been neither a carbon copy of Kenyan capitalism nor, as John Saul and Basil Davidson inferred in the late Seventies, an inferior version of Frelimo-style socialism in neighbouring Mozambique. According to Ranger, the disparaging depictions of Zanu and its military wing Zanla were based on unavoidable ignorance: ‘While the ...”

“... battle-hardening came a grim hardening of party political practice – a kind of Stalinism, as Basil Davidson later came to think of it – mirrored in the bases of the Namibians and South Africans. Swapo ‘traitors’ were tortured by their commissars, while ANC dissenters were shoved in pits or executed. The balanced view is that Moscow and Havana ...”

“... partisans already mustered in Serbia: the missing word here would be ‘henceforth’. Nonetheless Basil Davidson, a liaison officer with Tito’s partisans, felt that E.P. had it right about the drops to Frank and his crew: London wanted the Bulgarian operation to wither. That might have been a tactical decision based on intelligence from the liaison ...”

“... Of Hobsbawm’s personal views, we learn little, beyond the fact that he was sceptical that Basil Davidson could have been a British agent as charged along with Rajk, since his career had suffered in the Cold War. There is no clue to his opinion of the Moscow Trials that destroyed the Old Bolsheviks and set the pattern for the sequels in ...”

“... of every possible carnal connotation from the most innocent vocabulary. When the Emperor Basil I ascended the throne, for instance, he sent for the son of the widow Danelis, ‘on account of their earlier partnership in spiritual brotherhood’. Boswell omits the clarification ‘spiritual’ from his translation altogether and notes that ...”

“... makes its consumption of a third of the world’s meat more shocking); and his remarks on dill, basil, gin and vodka contain minor inaccuracies. More seriously, he becomes much less persuasive the moment he gets anywhere near the subject of consumerism. The healthy scepticism which informs the rest of the book and allows him to debunk several persistent ...”

“... earlier – uncontaminated by later, particularly foreign, intrusions. ‘The Romans,’ James Davidson wrote recently in these pages, ‘were so thorough in forestalling the possibility of any actual heroics that might disturb the Roman peace that the dream-world of discourse was the only space left to the Greeks for great deeds’ (LRB, 23 ...”

“... should enquire in his diary: ‘Is Lloyd George a traitor?’ In the end, Lloyd George sacked Basil Thomson, head of the Special Branch, whose predilection for forged documents and putting tabs on the leaders of the Labour movement became intolerable. Andrew’s examination of the Zinoviev letter is particularly thorough. He concludes that it was probably ...”