“... well as the left. Looking back with ‘enormous admiration’ for ‘this big handsome fellow’, Eric Hobsbawm remembers being ‘struck by one thing about him: though always helpful, always friendly … he remained surprisingly discreet. If he gave anything away, it was because he meant to.’ Sensing there was something other people shouldn’t know ...”

“... as they liked – a mixture which will come as no surprise to such historians as Richard Cobb or Eric Hobsbawm. I am very much afraid that my friend Peter Laslett’s hair will stand on end when he finds out what his carefully swaddled infant has become in my uncouth hands. I must therefore warn my readers that any resemblance between the Cambridge ...”

“... of its consequences was that other characteristically Corsican phenomenon, banditry. Ever since Eric Hobsbawm identified bandits in the Fifties and Sixties as social rebels rather than criminals, they have been a topic of lively debate. Not much of Hobsbawm’s thesis still stands undamaged as a result, and both ...”

“... And it’s a testament to the power of the communist ideal that the corporeal electricity which Eric Hobsbawm felt as a boy marching with the KPD in Weimar Berlin was still available to a young Pioneer half a century later in the Stalinist carapace of 1980s Albania. Ypi casually invites readers to exchange impressions from their own indoctrinated ...”

“... question remains a sticking point. He must hope that Scotland’s folk politics stem from what Eric Hobsbawm described as ‘the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist’. Leonard, who grew up in Yorkshire and admits to siding with England in sporting contests ...”

“... that’s that. RLB will press – or perhaps she won’t – the dreaded button, and like the late Eric Hobsbawm believes in ‘progressive patriotism’. Social democratic normality is slowly being restored.So much for England. Will the SNP’s triumph in Scotland (especially if repeated in the Scottish elections next year) lead to ...”

“... the two groups characterised by W.G. Hoskins as ‘the shearers and the shorn’? Or was it, as Eric Kerridge argued in a vigorous assault on the baneful influence of the socialist Tawney, a much more benign process, the cost greatly exaggerated by sentimental historians, who failed to see that the law did in fact protect the interests of the poor ...”

“... For some years now, the most impressive intellectual input to the Kinnock camp has been that of Eric Hobsbawm, who is actually a member of quite another party, a fact which is surely comment enough in itself. But Labour still exists, which the Alliance no longer does. In their different ways all the members of the old Gang of Four have effectively ...”

“... myself among them, Jewish intellectuals who should have known better fare worst of the lot. Eric Hobsbawm, for instance: he ends up floored no less than nine times, for everything from Stalinism to ‘gratuitous vernacular’ and joking about Nietzsche. Since the Zeitgeist business is so vigorous just now many may find Selbourne’s title and ...”

“... in this subject in the two decades after 1965. Inspired by the work of E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, American scholars redefined a field which had been almost exclusively taken up with the history of trades union to encompass working-class life and culture outside the workplace as well as within it. Practised primarily by historians who came ...”

“... the crisis about, and what was its resolution? The original case for a crisis was made in 1954 by Eric Hobsbawm, who argued that it should be understood in the context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism: vigorous mercantile and commercial interests that had been gaining strength through the previous century reacted with rebellion and revolt ...”

“... Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Levinas), history (Bloch, Braudel, Hobsbawm, Needham, Elliott), sociology (Mosca, Pareto, Weber, Simmel, Mann), anthropology (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard) or literary studies (Bakhtin, de Man, Barthes). All these foundational figures are European. The grand American ...”

“... ardour at that time was somewhat bookish, and amounted in the main to an admiration for Eric Hobsbawm’s dry eloquence at the Cambridge University Socialist Club (or CUSC) and Harry Pollitt’s stirring oratory at Popular Front rallies in Hyde Park and at the Albert Hall. In addition, we studied the Basic Texts and met in our college cells to ...”

“... Britain and Britishness, is timely. Earlier this summer, a leader in the Times attacked Tom Nairn, Eric Hobsbawm and especially Linda Colley for supplying a tendentious, politicised justification for the break-up of Britain. Citing a recent article by J.C.D. Clark, the Times claimed that Britain and Britishness, far from being ‘forged’ largely in the ...”

“... it was Foot’s – and, of course, that of Foot’s protégé Neil Kinnock, aided and abetted by Eric Hobsbawm, of all people. This analysis seems to me wildly perverse. Indeed, even former Bennites have repudiated it with their feet, if not always with their tongues. Now that public apologies for past misdeeds have become fashionable, it is possible ...”