kibbutz vision of Israel and took part in building the Zionist state during the 1960s. Like many with his left-wing background, he had become disillusioned and scathingly critical of Israel by the early 1990s. "Judt relishes his role as a public intellectual and makes accessible swathes of history and ideas" Judt gave much of his early career to the history of the French left, but could not buy into their assumption that the Russian Revolution was merely the continuation of 1789. And to his credit, he saw through the cultural studies, Marcuse-era left of 1968, too. As he rightly puts it, 'my residual socialist-Marxist formation made me instinctively suspicious of the popular notion that students might now be a -- the -- revolutionary class'. He was also spot on about how the cultural left fragmented history as a discipline into competing 'narratives'. These are all sharp, well-observed points. So it's a pity that, like so many left-leaning academics before him, he retained that most durable of illusions: belief in the credibility of the British Labour Party's social democracy. For someone so well versed in Marxism and interwar radicalism, it's surprising that he remained steadfastly quiet about the real purpose of social democracy. And if he was feeling generous about its achievements, he doesn't nail down social democracy's strengths during its postwar heyday, either. Although he used the social-democracy banner to describe contemporary politics both in Britain and Europe, there's no awareness of how 'parliamentary socialism' has come to mean something