Talking of Marxists feeling obliged to conceal their pop culture love behind aliases, Kirk Razga tells me that Eric Hobsbawm--regarded by some as our greatest living historian and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from the Thirties right up to just before the party dissolved in 1991--was a jazz critic for the New Statesman in the 1950s using the pseudonym Francis Newton, under which name he also published a book, The Jazz Scene.