Khrushchev's secret speech, the Suez crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary mark 1956 as a crucial turning point, and the common reference point for the formation of the New Left. This issue of Socialist History Journal explores the different ways in which 1956 was understood, its role in stimulating New Left thinking and the creation of its long-term legacy.

Lesley Hardy focuses on Edward Thompson's 'great apathy' - the failure of conventional political responses to the crises of 1956. He shows there are important continuities between the political project of the New Left, the literary criticism of F. R. Leavis and the Scrutiny movement.

In narrower focus, Grant Pooke uses a range of new sources in his account of Francis Klingender's life and associates. Pooke explores the interplay between Klingender's professional judgment, and the requirement, as a communist, to support the Soviet Union and the aesthetic line being promoted at the time.

New Left Review, one of the most significant institutions to emerge from the British New Left, is compared here with Dissent, the American magazine born in the 1950s. Sebastian Berg looks at these journals in the period immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and their effect on critical thinking, in terms of a changed political environment, experienced in many cases as personal loss. The terms of this change challenged the whole basis of the contribution the traditional left felt it had made to a radical theory and social criticism.

Dorothy Diamond, a schoolteacher and leading light in the friendship initiatives between Britain and East Germany, is examined by Stefan Berger and Norman La Porte. Diamond was scarcely a typical communist in any respect. Her route to communism was almost as idiosyncratic as her particularly enduring love for the GDR; yet she remained as 'English as roast beef'. In the Perspectives section David Renton looks at the writing of socialist biography.