Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm, who died on 1 October 2012 at the age of 95, was one of the foremost historians of the 20th century. His many books include a three-part study of the ‘long 19th century’ (The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire), Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century and a memoir, Interesting Times.

Letter

Last Days of Weimar

24 January 2008

Eric Hobsbawm writes: To show that everybody underestimated Hitler before his appointment as chancellor of Germany 75 years ago, even his announced victims, I chose to quote the title of an editorial by Leopold Schwarzschild to the effect that, in the words of your correspondent Andreas Wesemann, ‘Hitler would be neutralised if he had to share responsibility for German economic and foreign policy’...
Letter

Hungary 1956

16 November 2006

I do not want to take issue with the views expressed in response to my article on the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, but three points need comment (Letters, 30 November 2006). First, the passages mainly criticised were not mine but taken from my summary of Charles Gati’s argument ‘in the author’s own words’. Second, my article does not suggest, nor does Gati, that the Hungarian revolution was...
Letter

Red Science

9 March 2006

The contrast between the official attitude to J.D. Bernal in 1946 and George Orwell’s is not mine, as Christopher Hitchens suggests, but is made in Andrew Brown’s biography (Letters, 6 April). Nor was I challenging Orwell’s judgment about his views and style. There is not a word in my piece which justifies Hitchens’s accusations that it is Stalinist in style or content. I was merely observing...
Letter

Benefits of Diaspora

20 October 2005

My piece on the Jewish Emancipation went to press before the announcement of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics. It’s worth pointing out that one of the winners is Robert Aumann, born in 1930 in Frankfurt, educated in the US, now working at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
Letter

E.H. Carr

10 January 1983

SIR: E.H. Carr will survive his obituarists, if only because his History of Soviet Russia constitutes, with Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, the most remarkable effort of single-handed historical scholarship undertaken in Britain within living memory. (This is described as ‘gigantomania’ by the ungigantic.) Whatever the judgment of his work in the 21st century, it is rather...

Indomitable: Marx and Hobsbawm

Terry Eagleton, 3 March 2011

In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way. What had happened in the meanwhile? Were these people...

Read more reviews

The Age of EJH: Eric Hobsbawm’s Memoirs

Perry Anderson, 3 October 2002

What apter practitioners of autobiography than historians? Trained to examine the past with an impartial eye, alert to oddities of context and artifices of narrative, they would appear to be the...

Read more reviews

Contra Mundum

Edward Said, 9 March 1995

A powerful and unsettling book, Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes brings to a close the series of historical studies he began in 1962 with The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, and...

Read more reviews

Where will this voyage end?

Neal Ascherson, 14 June 1990

Historians as a tribe are suckers for anniversaries, no less than journalists. And both professions are equally unwilling to leave a nice, juicy coincidence alone, in the spirit of that...

Read more reviews

Hobsbawm Today

Ross McKibbin, 22 June 1989

Eric Hobsbawm is one of Britain’s most creative Marxist historians. Anyone who teaches at a school or university is aware of the effect of his writing, even on those who do not know from...

Read more reviews

History and the Left

Jonathan Haslam, 4 April 1985

In 1977 E.H. Carr completed his 14-volume History of Soviet Russia. He had embarked on an intellectual day excursion but found himself on a major expedition through a dark continent of knowledge....

Read more reviews

Pastiche

Norman Stone, 21 July 1983

One of Arnold Toynbee’s Laws was that, in any civilisation, mannered imitation of the past was a Bad Thing: he chose the Poles’ decision to reconstruct the Old City of Warsaw after...

Read more reviews

Marxismo

Jon Elster, 18 March 1982

Up to a fairly recent time it was the case that all good books on Marx were hostile, or at most neutral. Correlatively, all the books that espoused Marx’s views did so in a way that could...

Read more reviews

On the State of the Left

W.G. Runciman, 17 December 1981

Ever since the Industrial Revolution and the first stirrings of socialist political theory, the intellectual protagonists of the Left have started with a twofold debating advantage over their...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences