As a ‘form of inquiry’, Samuel wrote in the LRB of 14 June 1990, history is a ‘journey into the unknown’.

Samuel joined the party as soon as he was old enough, but left as part of the mass exodus prompted by Khrushchev’s secret speech and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956.

In 1967, Samuel founded the History Workshop movement to democratise ‘the act of historical production, enlarging the constituency of historical writers, and bringing the experience of the present to bear upon the interpretation of the past’; it held huge, radical and ecumenical events, published pamphlets and books, and in 1976 founded its own journal, still running today.

Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and subheaded under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to be constantly reshuffled so that new combinations of ideas appeared, presuppositions might be overturned and surprising connections thereby generated ... All that was needed was reams of rough paper, scissors and a pot of glue, phalanxes of lever-arch files, and a hole-puncher.

Raphael Samuel​ adopted his notetaking method from Beatrice and Sidney Webb