“... Lord Acton advised his students at Cambridge to ‘study problems, not periods’. Some years ago, Eric Hobsbawm, referring to two history textbooks that presented old-fashioned narratives without interpretation, noted that they made ‘the systematic consideration’ of historical problems ‘virtually impossible’. Gove, Schama and their allies are ...”

“... writings of Tony Benn. In his book Arguments for Socialism and in his fascinating dialogue with Eric Hobsbawm in the October number of Marxism Today, all questions about ‘what should be done’ get turned into arguments about ‘how to do things’ – always democratically (always?). But, to be fair, there is far more tangible policy in the ...”

“... Reacting to this fundamentally novel situation and the interpretative freedom it offers, Eric Hobsbawm urges us to experience the work as a stirring piece of ‘literature’. Admitting that it is ‘a historical document, out of date in many respects’, he invites us to appreciate its rhetorical élan and even to feel its ‘Biblical ...”

“... his people’s identity. It was a bestseller in Israel and won the Prix Aujourd’hui in France. Eric Hobsbawm called it a ‘much needed exercise in the dismantling of nationalist historical myth’. Sand’s new book, The Invention of the Land of Israel, aims to trace the concept of a Jewish homeland from the vague territorial references of the Torah ...”

“... the view is current that the Revolution achieved almost nothing of its original intentions. As Eric Hobsbawm has written, its one lasting success was the military defeat of Hitler, made possible by Stalin’s forced industrialisation of Russia. But the unintended consequences of that success defeated the Soviet experiment itself. ‘The most lasting ...”

“... Coleman at the Five Spot. ‘The unforgettable thing about this very dark, soft-handed man,’ Eric Hobsbawm wrote, ‘is the passion with which he blows. I have heard nothing like it in modern jazz since Parker.’ But a number of jazz musicians suspected a hustle, particularly East Coast musicians who considered him a musical primitive, if a shrewd ...”

“... history has a horizon. Some write modern European history orientated towards 1914 or 1939. For Eric Hobsbawm it was the rise and fall of the Soviet project that framed the short 20th century. For the gloomy histories of Europe that emerged from the 1990s, such as Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent, the moment of collaboration and ...”

“... administrative tribes. In others, tribes were designated arbitrarily – or ‘invented’, as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger meant the term in The Invention of Tradition (1983). The common aspect of all these cases is that tribe was everywhere an administrative unit during the colonial period, and tribal identity an officially designated ...”

“... at Cambridge, Schlesinger went on to make several friends and acquaintances on the left, including Eric Hobsbawm. His early work focused squarely on class conflict. In his first academic article, written while he was an undergraduate, he presented the New England Transcendentalist Orestes Brownson as a ‘Marxist before Marx’, claiming that any other ...”

“... too, where the Soviet Union is concerned.With regard to the lasting value of Conquest’s work, Eric Hobsbawm wrote in 1996 that, while The Great Terror was a ‘remarkable pioneer effort’, it had been made obsolete by the opening of the archives. With all respect, I don’t think that is how it has turned out. To be sure, we know a lot more about ...”

“... proles. Stability and continuity urgently needed reinforcement, on both sides of the fence. As Eric Hobsbawm argued in Age of Extremes (1994), in two decades of peaceful development the ‘shorter 20th century’ had managed to generate a new relatively advantaged class, which aspired to something a lot better. Civil society seemed to have got way ...”

“... favoured by Hitler but it was in fact far more distinctive. In his lively preface to the catalogue Eric Hobsbawm deplores the ‘pompous rhetoric’ of official Fascist architecture. But it included some of the most original buildings of this century – and many which were elegant without bombast, Florence railway station, for example – and I do not ...”

“... and the few who penetrate its defences tell a depressing story. Yet many left-wing intellectuals (Eric Hobsbawm, Perry Anderson), as well as several novelists aside from Graham Greene, have been drawn to this isolated and landlocked country, intrigued by its heroic 19th-century history, by the survival of Guaraní, its Indian lingua franca, by the ruins ...”

“... bruisers who went onto the streets to punch and shoot back. ‘Mass ecstasy’ was the way Eric Hobsbawm, then a teenager in Berlin, described street confrontations with the Nazis in the early 1930s.The political concepts of left and right originate in the seating plan at the National Assembly of the French Revolution, but the rise of ...”

“... to make the first recorded ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865. ‘For reasons which are obscure,’ Eric Hobsbawm CH has noted cattily, ‘such strenuous activities amid inspiring scenery appealed particularly to Anglo-Saxon professional men of liberal leanings (perhaps the close company of tough and handsome native guides had something to do with ...”