Mural by Diego Rivera ‘Man at the Crossroads’ or ‘Man, Controller of the Universe’ made in 1934, Palacio de Bellas Artes. Image via Bjanka Kadic/ Alamy The phrase “cultural Marxism” has a convoluted history. Its origins arguably go back a century, to when the Nazis spoke of “Judaeo-Bolshevism” and “cultural Bolshevism” to cast communism as a Jewish conspiracy. In the postwar era, it was occasionally used by left-wing academics such as Dennis Dworkin, whose Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain (1997) is a history of the New Left and the rise of cultural studies. More recently, cultural Marxism has become refashioned as a weapon for the reactionary right to wield in the culture wars to explain the decay of Western civilisation. In The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy , the historian AJA Woods is interested only in this last incarnation. His story is as much about the right’s engagement in the culture wars as it is about cultural Marxism.…