A professor of Classics and Ancient History from 1965 to 1981, Browning was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group and a famous Hellenist who campaigned against the dictatorship of the Greek Colonels (1947-74) and later served as the chairman of the British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles. Like Ste Croix, Browning applied a Marxist theory of history to the ancient world. But his approach was different to that of Ste Croix, as was revealed in a review he published in 1983 of Ste Croix’s classic The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek Work (1981). Browning observed that Ste Croix’s book avoided the “kind of sectarian infighting in which some Marxists indulge”, and, as such was “a very English and pragmatic book, which may well infuriate some Marxist readers”. In other words, Browning favoured a more unequivocal Marxist account of historical change, while still contending that “I say a Marxist approach and not the Marxist approach”. Browning was also loyal to the Soviet Union, not only publishing a couple of articles in Russian but also maintaining a “close relationship… with the leading members of the national committees in the eastern bloc, accepting the structure of the academic community in the USSR as he did in politics”.