  He told Hugh: ‘I personally get much the same kind of “kick” out of reading Lenin at his best, as I do out of reading some of the tough &amp; argumentative old Scottish Calvinists—John Knox and the rest’. Prior remained strongly left-wing for the rest of his life, but his flirtation with communism was over by 1946. In that year he wrote to his friend Lex Miller, saying he had been ‘released’ from ‘a sort of complex that I have had about Marxism right up till now, a kind of inward bondage to it despite all my points of difference from it, based on the feeling that though its philosophy might be abominable its economics were unanswerable.’