Bruce Murray may be the least celebrated of the many important South African historians of the 1980s. One reason for this neglect is that his research specialisation – drawn from his mid-1960s theses at the University of Kansas – was on Lloyd George’s famous 1909 Budget. The first People’s Budget increased land and income taxes to fund the Liberal Party’s new pension, health and employment schemes and it set the fiscal lines of class conflict in modern Britain. It also triggered a revolt in the Lords, led by Alfred Milner, the former Imperial Proconsul in southern Africa, which hastened the decline of liberalism and the rise of the Labour Party. These long-term political consequences were more, as Murray shows, an accidental consequence of George’s fiery rhetoric than of a deliberate plan to lift the poor and fleece the middle class. Yet all of these questions around the fair distribution of tax and welfare remain powerful and unresolved in British politics, leading scholars back to the 1909 reforms and to Bruce Murray’s work. Sadly, their links to imperial, and especially South African, politics, have largely been forgotten, as much here as they have been in Britain.

In the republication of the history of Wits, two volumes of which were written by Murray, readers have an opportunity to explore the often dramatic and contested story of this university, and his two volumes, Murray’s distinctive style as writer. Perhaps to make up for the neglect of his excellent work on Lloyd George, Murray produced an intimate, almost scandalous intellectual history of the institution that served as his home for practically half a century. The first volume – this book – was published in 1982 (shortly after the modest and careful prose of the People’s Budget), and the second almost a generation later, in 1997. Both share the skilled archival historian’s interest in the high drama and low stakes of personalised emotional conflicts. Murray was always, without being nasty about it, a serious institutional and scholarly gossip, irresistibly attracted to the small-beer political conflicts within departments and levels of the university, and between the different South African institutions.