The place was the Omega Workshops, the London centre for advanced art. He cocked it slightly to one side to his satisfaction, then, taking a few steps backwards, raised his hand as though to shake hands with someone, and approached the mirror with an ingratiating smile. The witness to this private performance was the painter Winifred Gill, lying unnoticed on a bed, in a shadowy corner of a studio, pretending to be fast asleep as the scene unfolded before her narrowed eyes. He backed again and tried the effect of a sudden recognition with a look of surprised pleasure. Then, cocking the cap at a more dashing angle, his face froze and he turned and glanced over his shoulder with a look of scorn and disgust." Then he removed the cap and strode out of the room The date was 1917. A man is at the mirror, a new cap in his hand He doesn't know anyone's watching.

"He tried it on in front of the looking glass on the mantel piece. Its sequel, eagerly awaited, will examine a world turned upside down by totalitarian political religions, after 32 million men had been killed or mutilated pursuing a Holy War.Kenneth O Morgan, biographer of Keir Hardie and James Callaghan, has just completed a biography of Michael Foot. The author, attached to the University of Cardiff, might reflect that Welsh disestablishment, achieved amid broad indifference in 1920, was above all a political statement of national identity against the Church of England in Wales.But this is only to say that Burleigh has written a thought-provoking, deeply civilised book. But we hear nothing of frankly anti-religious socialists like the Fabians. Burleigh's view of them emerges in an offhand reference to Sidney Webb "worshipping the ghastly Beatrice and the beastly Soviet Union". A throwaway line about the Left's enduring, characteristic "unselfconscious projection of its own conspiratorial imaginings and its corrupt modus operandi" has a man-down-the-club ring to it.The idea that those who advocated Church disestablishment were intrinsically religious in motivation should be re-examined That would hardly apply to Clemenceau or Jaures, say. Its very introduction is a complicated statement of what the book is about.

And it stops with Pope Benedict XV's ineffective peace moves in 1917: since we have no conclusion, it is not clear where the argument has got us.The emphasis is always on the enduring importance of religion. We read that in Britain "socialism did not displace Christianity". This is certainly true of ILP evangelists like Hardie and Snowden. Imperialism should be added to this list.But Burleigh also has a far more original theme, the mutation of secular creeds into "political religions". Tocqueville saw this in examining the messianic impulse of the French Revolution Others later applied the idea to modern totalitarianism. Thus the Jacobin Robespierre appears as a highly religious prophet: he condemned the de-Christianising zeal of apostles of the Cult of Reason, and it cost him his life.Burleigh shows how the trappings, and in part the substance, of organised religion coloured the international socialist movement. In that sense, when Morgan Phillips observed that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism to Marx, he was making a doubtful conceptual distinction Utopian thinkers - St.