Archibald Horace Mann Robertson[note 1] (1886 – 14 October 1961) was an English civil servant who became a writer on history, social affairs from a left-wing perspective and critiques of Christianity.
Further spurs to his thinking came from Shelley's Queen Mab with its "devastating notes", J. W. Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science and, most of all, Belfort Bax's The Ethics of Socialism.
The 1906 General Election, a landslide victory for the Liberals and the first substantial representation for the Labour Party, took place shortly after he started at Oxford.
[6] He avidly read left-wing periodicals such as The Clarion, Labour Leader, The New Age and Justice, the weekly newspaper of the Social Democratic Federation.
At this period he published using the pseudonym Robert Arch,[1] partly to avoid confusion with his father, who was writing on topics in church history, and also to lower his profile with respect to his employers in the Admiralty.
With a number of others he became concerned that the RPA focussed too narrowly on the demolition of superstition and the popularisation of science, valuable though that work was.
After his fourth visit, prompted partly also by the rise in Germany of Nazism, in 1938 he became a member of the Communist Party,[6] and remained so for the rest of his life.