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“... But he is also conscious that he may himself embody a sweeping moment in history. He draws on Eric Hobsbawm, who recognised that this change – ‘the death of the peasantry’ – is ‘perhaps the most fundamental one the contemporary modern world has seen’. Joyce thinks of himself as a historian of his own life: ‘I have seen this world we ...”

“... of the trade, such as Patrick Collinson on Elizabeth I, Michael Howard on Sir John Hackett, Eric Hobsbawm on Karl Marx (well, he lived here for thirty years, and undeniably ‘influenced the nation’s life’). Also impressive is how frequently those who have already written the authoritative intellectual biography have been persuaded to ...”

“... rendered whole once more.Such contrasting verdicts are not in themselves such a novelty. Eric Hobsbawm was proclaiming ‘The Death of Neoliberalism’ back in 1998. A dozen years later Colin Crouch, no less averse to it as a system, reached the opposite conclusion, entitling his book on its misadventures The Strange Non-Death of ...”

“... modernity dissolve or intensify these? In his recent survey of their development since 1750 Eric Hobsbawm concludes that the owl of Minerva has now flown over nations and nationalism. In the skies over the USSR and Eastern Europe, some would more readily detect the petrel; others the albatross. The rival hypotheses are, at all events, going to be ...”

“... if he had assumed the task of exposing how deeply it had absorbed Orientalist mythologies. Unlike Eric Hobsbawm, whom he faulted for having a Eurocentric, top-down perspective of the short 20th century, he took no interest in jazz or popular music. (His daughter, Najla, would score a small victory by turning him on to Sinéad O’Connor.) He was a ...”

“... of only one thing: Germany will not be a dull place. ‘That great and ambiguous country’, as Eric Hobsbawm once called it, is going to occupy our attention over the next years. What kind of future it will come to represent remains hidden, not least to the Germans themselves. The phrase that lingers in the mind is a form of the interrogative peculiar ...”

“... and the Cenotaph ceremony. When he was made a Companion of Honour – unaware that the likes of Eric Hobsbawm, whose presence on a George Orwell fund sufficed for him to refuse to join it, would in due course receive the same bauble – he was so overcome that he listed the congratulations he received across twenty pages of his normally sharp-witted ...”

“... much needed services in the Sinaloa mountains’. This is Robin Hood the ‘noble robber’, in Eric Hobsbawm’s characterisation. In the final edition of his much reworked book Bandits, Hobsbawm bids farewell to the type. ‘In a fully capitalist society,’ he writes, the conditions in which social banditry on ...”

“... to the arts. Carmen Callil, Raymond’s publisher, is wheeled on to say that he was no novelist; Eric Bellchambers, WEA organiser in his Sussex days, remembers him as a prima donna; Jim Fyrth, an extra-mural tutor who prides himself on using ‘simple but lively language’, rebukes Raymond for being ‘convoluted’, ‘dense’ and ‘impenetrable’ (‘I ...”

“... go. (An excerpt from Reynolds’s index: ‘Hilton, Paris; Himmler, Heinrich; Hitler, Adolf; Hobsbawm, Eric; Hockney, David; Holder, Noddy’.) One problem with this kind of polymorphously clued-in work is that the author has to pretend to a functioning expertise in a dozen different disciplines ...”