marx

A surname from German

The family tree boasts an astonishing array of celebrated historical figures from the prophet Isaiah to Sir Isaiah Berlin, from Felix Mendelssohn to Karl Marx and Moses Montefiore. The list also includes Yehudi Menuhin, Helena Rubinstein, the Rothschilds and even Rosenstein himself.

A surname from German

This is one of the developments Karl Marx failed to predict. Had he foreseen it he might have expired in guffaws, rolling in the aisle of the British Museum Library amid the notes for Das Kapital, that bearded Santa Claus of the revolution who slipped the unwanted gift of communism down the world's chimneys.

He discovered that far from focusing on the writings of Marx and Engels for their reading, the Bolsheviks and their children preferred expressly anti-revolutionary works by western authors such as Dickens, Defoe, Shakespeare, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Goethe, Kipling and Wilde.