Keith Flett (Letters, 15 August) notes that the Trinidadian Marxist CLR James wrote on cricket for the Manchester Guardian while becoming a leading member of the British Trotskyist movement. Those interested in reading more about his Guardian reports in 1933-35 might be interested in my recent essay in the latest issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (vol 52, no 3). In the later 1930s, the Guardian’s liberal scepticism in the face of the hysteria about “Trotsky-fascism” during Stalin’s Moscow trials meant that the paper was once accused by a leading member of the Communist party of Great Britain of having been taken in by James, “the Manchester Guardian Trotskyist”. There may not be any of those today, but the Guardian might remember its best liberal traditions and show at least some scepticism amid the current hysteria around Trotskyism.

Christian Høgsbjerg

Leeds

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