Short answers, pulled from the story.
Alfred Cobban was an English historian born on the 24th of May 1901 who served as Professor of French History at University College London. He is best known for challenging the orthodox Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution, arguing it was a political revolution with social consequences rather than a class-driven social upheaval.
"The Myth of the French Revolution" was a lecture Cobban delivered in 1954 as his inaugural address as Professor of French History at University College London, then published in 1955. In it he attacked the "social interpretation" of the French Revolution and argued that the Revolution did little to fundamentally change French society.
Cobban argued that approximately 95 per cent of France's 26 million people still lived in isolated farms, hamlets, villages, and small country towns, and that agriculture still followed medieval routines. He contended that in fundamental respects it mattered little whether one was describing France in 1789 or 1799.
The Revisionist school, also called Liberalism in historical scholarship, holds that the French Revolution was a political revolution rather than a social or class revolution. Alfred Cobban is credited as a founding figure of this school, alongside George V. Taylor and the French historian Francois Furet.
Cobban taught history at King's College in Newcastle-on-Tyne before becoming Professor of French History at University College London. He held a Rockefeller Fellowship for research in France and served as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and Harvard University.
Cobban's major works include The Myth of the French Revolution (1955), The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964, Cambridge University Press), and the three-volume A History of Modern France (1957-1965). His first book, on Edmund Burke, appeared in 1929 from George Allen and Unwin.