13 Facts About Victor Kiernan

Edward Victor Gordon Kiernan was a British historian and a member of the Communist Party Historians Group.

Victor Kiernan was involved in promoting Urdu poetry among Western audiences.

Victor Kiernan's family came from a congregationalist, non-conformist religious tradition that he later suggested played a role in his socialist formation and that of many of the Communist Party Historians Group founded in 1946.

Victor Kiernan found his radicalism subsequently reinforced by what he regarded as the treachery of Britain's elites.

In 1938, as a junior fellow, Victor Kiernan departed for Bombay in to continue his political activities and to teach at the Sikh National College and Aitchison College in Lahore, India.

In 1970, Victor Kiernan was given a Personal Chair in Modern History; a position he held until his retirement in 1977.

In 1993 at the age of 80, Victor Kiernan produced Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen a book he had been working on since 1947.

Victor Kiernan died peacefully in his sleep, aged 95, in Stow, Scotland.

Victor Kiernan made immense contributions to the post-war flowering of British Marxist historiography that transformed the understanding of social history.

Victor Kiernan wrote a major essay in 1952 for the first issue of the journal, produced several landmark articles, and later served on its editorial board from 1973 to 1983.

Victor Kiernan contributed to New Left Review throughout the journal's transitions.

Victor Kiernan elevated writers from the East who had been largely banished by guardians of the Western canon and then overlooked by stylish post-modern literary figures looking for more transgressive exemplars of literary craft.

Victor Kiernan was married twice: to the Indian theatre director, dancer and playwright Shanta Gandhi, from 1938 to 1946; and to the Canadian scholar Heather Massey, from 1984 until his death.