Mark Steel delivers an irreverent but admiring homily on Marx, following him from Trier to Paris and thence to Soho, where the author of Das Kapital lived in dire poverty above the Quo Vadis restaurant (not as fashionable a spot then as it is now), wrote letters asking Engels for money and went on pub crawls up the Tottenham Court Road.

Steel’s explanation of Hegel’s dialectic, using a couple of plates and a salt cellar, may seem a bit over-simplified, but the essentials are here, despite one or two errors of detail (Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables about the 1830 revolution, not the one in 1848). Full Marx, though, for an amusing attempt at rehab, given the unpopularity of the man and his ideas just now.