Original sentence: At Cambridge he was struck again by the  strength of his inherited proletarian culture, and his shyness mutated into a conscious distaste for bourgeois careerism.He lived for nine months in Clermont-Ferrand, improving his French, and learned some German in Innsbruck.He travelled much of Africa on a shoestring in the mid 1970s, from Casablanca to the Cape, and "dawdled" in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) at the time of its unilateral independence under white rule
Edited sentence: At Cambridge he was struck again by the  strength of his inherited proletarian culture, and his shyness seems to have modulated into a conscious distaste for bourgeois careerism (Marxist thought was still influential in the West at that date).He lived for nine months in Clermont-Ferrand, improving his French, and learned some German at Innsbruck, where he stayed with the family of the university librarian.He travelled much of Africa on a shoestring in the mid 1970s, from Casablanca to the Cape, and "dawdled" in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) at the time of illegal white rule