[3] He had one sister, Shona,[3] and the family initially lived in a two-bedroom flat without an indoor toilet, before moving into a council house in 1967.
[2] Davidson's family originated in the village of Monymusk, which he visited on holidays as a child, and this connection to rural Scotland would influence his later intellectual work.
[3][4] After leaving school, Neil Davidson became a clerk in the Grampian Health Board,[3] where his father worked as a radiographer.
[9] According to Gregor Gall, Davidson 'found it hard to enter academia because selection panels did not appreciate his work or its places of publication like Pluto.
[14] Having remained a 'thrawnly independent-minded' member through the 2000s,[1] he left the SWP in 2013 during the internal crisis over the leadership's handling of rape allegations and helped to found Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21) in 2014.
[3] Whilst living in London in the 1980s, Neil Davidson's flatmate was author Andrew Murray Scott.
[1] Davidson met his life partner Cathy Watkins whilst they were both working at the Scottish Office.
[1] In September 2019, during an international conference in Glasgow where he had debated with historian Robert Brenner, Davidson was rushed to hospital and diagnosed with a brain tumour.