The Editors

Colin Burrow on Bring Up the Bodies in the LRB, 7 June 2012: The word 'haunting' is much abused, but is absolutely, almost literally, right for this book... At one time or another almost every character (except plain, prosaic Jane Seymour) sees something like a spectre.

Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that 'the union and its forerunners have for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.' Writing in the LRB five years ago, Perry Anderson observed: The integration of the East into the Union is the major achievement to which admirers of the new Europe can legitimately point. Of course, as with the standard encomia of the record of EU as a whole, there is a gap between ideology and reality in the claims made for it.

Eric Hobsbawm died early this morning at the age of 95. Reviewing his essay collection How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 in the LRB last year, Terry Eagleton wrote: 'Its author has lived through so much of the political turbulence he portrays that it is easy to fantasise that History itself is speaking here, in its wry, all-seeing, dispassionate wisdom.' In 1994, Edward Said wrote: 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 followed in 1975 and 1987 respectively with The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. It is difficult to imagine that anyone other than Hobsbawm could have approached – much less achieved – the consistently high level of these volumes: taken together, they represent one of the summits of historical writing in the postwar period.

Anyone looking for Eliot Weinberger's recent online only pieces on Mitt Romney can find them here: 'A Hologram for President' (1 September); 'Mouse Mouth Mitt' (22 September).

Today, apparently, is Roald Dahl Day (were he alive it would be his 96th birthday). Here's Michael Irwin in the LRB on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (from a review of George's Marvellous Medicine, 1 October 1981): There are several things that Roald Dahl has got emphatically right, the most important being his appreciation of the passion children feel for sweets in general and perhaps for chocolate in particular. For pre-pubertal Westerners, sweets fill the vacuum later to be occupied by sex. It is unnerving to watch an otherwise decent child being temporarily demoralised (in the literal sense of being morally corrupted) by a desire for sweets as an otherwise decent adult may be by sexual need.