Erick Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm, who lived from 1917 to 2012, was a historian whose reputation had become global by the time he died at 95. His books were translated into more than fifty languages, and he was as widely read in Brazil and Italy as in Britain and the United States. Decades after their first publication, his works still appear on university reading lists, and their influence on how history is written remains substantial.

His life crossed many countries and cultures and covered an unusually broad range of interests, from poetry and jazz to literature and politics. He worked as a university teacher, but he also held many other roles: a young Communist in the Weimar Republic, a radical undergraduate at Cambridge, a political campaigner, an army conscript, a man-about-town in Soho, a member of the Hampstead intellectual circle, a Cambridge fellow, an influential journalist, a traveller around the world, and, later in life, a senior figure in the literary world.

Richard Evans follows Hobsbawm both as a scholar and as a witness to the past, tracing the major political and intellectual movements of the twentieth century. Hobsbawm did not only write and speak about the defining questions of his age; he took part in several of them, including Communist resistance to Hitler and the revolution in Cuba, where he worked as an interpreter for Che Guevara. He was also a notable figure in the Soho jazz scene of the late 1950s, and his writing helped shape the emergence of New Labour in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

As the first biography of Hobsbawm, the book looks at far more than the career of one professional historian. It is also an account of an entire era.