“... out spectacular robberies in England, France and America at the turn of the century. In Bandits, Eric Hobsbawm describes how suitable robbers might be ‘idealised and given the attributes of Robin Hood when they concentrated on holding up merchants, rich travellers and others who enjoyed no great sympathy among the poor. Thus in 18th-century ...”

“... For Eric Hobsbawm​ , the Russian Revolution – which occurred, as it happens, in the year of his birth – was the central event of the 20th century. Its practical impact on the world was ‘far more profound and global’ than that of the French Revolution a century earlier: for ‘a mere thirty to forty years after Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd, one third of humanity found itself living under regimes directly derived from the [revolution] … and Lenin’s organisational model, the Communist Party ...”

“... are therefore wholly without previous experience of office?1 January. Delighted to see a CH for Eric Hobsbawm and a CBE for David Lockwood in the New Year Honours. Would either have been honoured at all without the change of government? David, although Britain’s number one sociologist, is almost the only academic I know who is wholly without the ...”

“... the conversation marathons, as a ‘protest against forgetting’ (a phrase borrowed from Eric Hobsbawm, one of his many interviewees), but his avant-gardism also commits him to ceaseless innovation. One of his guiding principles is that an exhibition ‘should always invent a new rule of the game’, or at least ‘a new display feature’. And ...”

“... 1880s – a result of the ‘division’ of the English moral consciousness. (Materialists like Eric Hobsbawm have, of course, put it down to such things as German supremacy in steel production.) The kernel of chauvinism at the heart of Letwin’s book – which asserts that if Britain had cleaved to the old monistic Trollopian ways we should still be ...”

“... a much smaller chronological range and should perhaps be yoked with its companion volume in the Eric Hobsbawm-edited History of British Society, J.F.C. Harrison’s Early Victorian Britain, for a proper comparison with Thompson’s undertaking: the two books have both been reissued in new editions by Thompson’s publisher, with the ...”

“... Stedman Jones, in his contribution ‘Engels and the History of Marxism’ to the volume edited by Hobsbawm. This issue is linked to the first, since those who embrace the Science of Logic also tend to hold that the views of Marx and Engels on dialectics were identical. Wood, for instance, claims that with respect to the dialectics of nature, the attempt to ...”

“... thirty-minute episode was broadcast live at 8 p.m. on Thursday, 29 January 1942, to the strains of Eric Coates’s ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’, apparently inspired by the view from Selsey towards Bognor Regis. It featured on the Forces Programme, which had been set up to provide a richer diet of drama, music and variety than the staid and news-oriented Home ...”

“... to ask what would have happened if the Academy had said yes. The best answer I know is Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s novel La Part de l’autre (2001), in which he chronicles the diverging lives of the Hitler who was rejected and the Adolf who was accepted. (Adolf is taken to see Dr Freud, who sorts out his complexes. Then he becomes a wonderful ...”

“... for new and better abstractions, but Wright often appears reluctant to take them on. As opposed to Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘short 20th century’, Wright’s hypothesis is of ‘the long Cold War’, of an Iron Curtain mythology decades in preparation, formalised by Churchill’s Missouri speech, and lingering on in a new century. Globalisation remains ...”

“... a hero of much legend but little substance. Spraggs notes that Robin Hood has been portrayed by Eric Hobsbawm in Bandits as the archetype of the ‘social bandit’ who championed his people against oppression and redistributed wealth to accord with his own idea of social justice. But she is unconvinced. ‘This Robin Hood’ – of legend – ‘is an ...”

“... very real problems which arise in any attempt to write ‘people’s history’ in this way. As Eric Hobsbawm explained in a recent issue of this review, when discussing volume six in this series, on methodology, all too often people’s history ‘sacrifices analysis and explanation to celebration and identification’. When taken to this ...”

“... a good deal of qualification, Michael Oakeshott; on the Left there is the author’s contemporary Eric Hobsbawm. Others’ heroes – Raymond Williams, for instance – are sometimes harshly dismissed (‘a nonconformist spellbinder, rhetorical, evasive and vacuous’). These judgments are made by an author whose discipline is the history of ideas. Like ...”

“... as Darwin. Probably none of our other leading historians – Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Keith Thomas – will gain such dubious recognition either. Alan’s style of narrative history has drawn criticism in recent years from young historians seeking a more ‘fundamental’ history in social, economic, familial and demographic ...”

“... was often compared with other practitioners of ‘history from below’, such as Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Albert Soboul and George Rudé, even though their Marxism was anathema to him. His magnum opus, on the armées révolutionnaires, the semi-vigilante armed bands who enforced the Terror in the provinces in 1793-4, might, in theory, have formed ...”