I've read a great deal of Cliff's work over the years, including his own autobiography, and most of what others have written about him. However, Ian Birchall's paper about researching Cliff's life story for his biography (not yet published) unearthed some information that was new to me. 1. Annie Machon, a former MI5 agent, was responsible for tapping Cliff's phone calls until 1996. She apparently refers to this in her 2005 book 'Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers'.
2. Cliff wrote, but abandoned, 2 books in the mid-1960s: on Keynes and the collectivisation of agriculture. These were found amongst his numerous papers after his death and are now part of the archive held at Warwick University.
3. He attended a Montessori school, providing what might be regarded as a 'progressive' education, as a child.
4. In the mid-1920s Cliff's father's building firm went bankrupt (Ian Birchall suggests this helped him become aware of capitalism's fragility).
5. The Korean war was the pretext for the expulsion, by leader Gerry Healy, of Cliff's comrades from the British section of the Trotskyist Fourth International - who went on to form the Socialist Review Group with Cliff. This group refused to support either side in this not-so-cold episode in the Cold War, in line with the 'Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism' stance they later became known for.
By the way, the picture is from the 1940s: Cliff with his wife Chanie Rosenberg, who remains an active revolutionary socialist over 60 years later.
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