I think of Marxist biography as an example of Ray Monk’s assertion that biography produces not truth but a way of seeing connections. But how does the biographer articulate the relationship between individual consciousness and social being? How does a Marxist biography differ from a ‘life and times’ approach? I will be talking about my 2020 book, The Fatal Lure of Politics: The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe? After explaining how I became interested in Childe, I will talk about the research and writing process, the difficulty of writing about the intersections of consciousness and social being, authorial identification with the subject, and intellectual biography as a political act.

Terry Irving, radical historian and educator, is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong. His books include The Fatal Lure of Politics: The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe (2020), Radical Sydney (with Rowan Cahill), Childe and Australia (with Peter Gathercole and Gregory Melleuish), Class Structure in Australian History (with Raewyn Connell), Youth in Australia (with Geoffrey Sherington and David Maunders) and The Southern Tree of Liberty. He was editor of Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History and a founder of the Free University (Sydney). www.terryirving.net

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