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I was told once by a leftwing scholar that as a Marxist, you have to do two things: always be optimistic and always have a view about everything. That advice still sounds good to me.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

Well you can be the son of a Marxist and not necessarily be a Marxist in all your views.

My mother, for the last 20 years anyway, would not call herself a Marxist but a human rights activist.

I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism.

I'm still a marginal figure living from book to book, but, as long as I'm producing labour as a good Marxist prole, I guess I'm satisfied.

It is a weird thing, because most people tend to get more conservative as they get older, but I find myself going the opposite way. I am sure that by the end I will be selling Marxist pamphlets on the Holloway Road.

Socialists find me too far left; Trotskyites not far enough; ecologists say I am too happy eating foie gras, defending nuclear energy and GM plants; feminists find I am not enough of a woman; anarchists a petit-bourgeois who has sold out because I believe in universal suffrage.