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“... was all a joke? We are speaking, note, about 1986, a few years before the Soviet bloc crumbled. As Eric Hobsbawm points out in this collection of essays, that wasn’t what caused so many erstwhile believers to bin their Guevara posters. Marxism was already in dire straits some years before the Berlin Wall came down. One reason given was that the ...”

“... On 25 January​ 1933, the 16-year-old Eric Hobsbawm marched with thousands of comrades through central Berlin to the headquarters of the German Communist Party (KPD). When they arrived at Karl Liebknecht Haus, on the Bülowplatz, the temperature was –18°C. They shuffled and waited in the bone-numbing cold for four hours to hear the podium speeches of the party cadres ...”

“... was a creative success. Raphael Samuel, on the left, photographed in 1958 by Roger Mayne. As Eric Hobsbawm, originally a sharp opponent who later joined the ‘management committee’, put it with characteristic clarity, ‘whoever backed the Partisan must have known it was not a serious business proposition but something of the youth and sheer ...”

“... perspective has had the effect of making those same males more dominant than ever. Thus Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982), however heroic in intention, ends up asserting that extra-European peoples did have a history, but it was a history of their relations with Euro-American economies. In his Age of Extremes, ...”

“... of the contributors to After the Fall are able to face that wrongness with the stoic honesty of Eric Hobsbawm. They face it, but often fail to contain their rage and misery. Some perform their own version of ‘Back to the Drawing-Board’, a dive back into the warrens of classic Marxist literature where – somewhere – the plague-rat of error must ...”

“... excitement. His stature among living 19th-century English historians is rivalled only by that of Eric Hobsbawm, and since the two men’s writings have little in common except an elegantly plain and direct prose, Clio herself would find it difficult to award the palm to one or the other. Hobsbawm is the most ...”

“... Thanks to​ the work of Norman Cohn, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Keith Thomas and others, we have, over the past few years, acquired a lot of information about millenarianism as a social and historical force. The belief that the end is nigh, or that a new series of times is about to begin, is very ancient, but it is also modern ...”

“... Party’s maverick intellectual journal, and the most celebrated of the ‘new revisionists’ is Eric Hobsbawm, whose Marx Memorial Lecture ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ became their seminal text.Strictly speaking, the new revisionism preceded ‘Thatcherism’. Hobsbawm’s lecture was delivered in ...”

“... as just about everything in Brewer’s Modern, who has edited a collection of essays, endorsed by Eric Hobsbawm, called The 20th Century: A Century of Wars and Revolutions (Rivers Oram, £14.99). Not to be outdone by Brewer, Oxford are marketing their ‘major new edition’ of the Oxford Compact English Dictionary (£11.99) on the way its new words ...”

“... Of all​ the 19th-century innovations disparaged by Eric Hobsbawm as ‘invented traditions’, the white wedding must rank alongside clan tartans as the most enduring, a convention now so firmly rooted that many people think it’s medieval. To the Georgians a white wedding was a foreign novelty. In 1818 a British traveller in Normandy, Dawson Turner, remarked on a bride emerging from church that she was dressed all in white – ‘even her shoes’, he wrote with some astonishment ...”

“... in his book, The British Marxist Historians (Maurice Dobb, Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Rodney Hilton). But Dobb would not normally pass as a historian; and Hobsbawm is not really British in terms of upbringing, as Kaye himself indicates. Furthermore, Hill and Thompson both seem more ...”

“... of human rights law at the LSE, has written a number of books on terrorism and human rights. Eric Hobsbawm For three weeks barbarism has been on show before a universal public, which has watched, judged and with few exceptions rejected Israel’s use of armed terror against the one and a half million inhabitants blockaded since 2006 in the Gaza ...”

“... Adams’s eerie Wunderkammer at the beginning of the 20th. In this generally disappointing field, Eric Hobsbawm has entered the lists with a work he invites us to read as the ‘flip side’ of Age of Extremes, his great history of the 20th century: ‘not world history illustrated by the experiences of an individual, but world history shaping that ...”

“... theorising divorced from the actual writing of history. Dr de Ste Croix spares nobody – not Eric Hobsbawm or Edward Thompson. But what he writes about theory is worth paying attention to, since, like Hobsbawm and Thompson, he has produced first-class history himself. His book should also stimulate ancient ...”

“... A powerful and unsettling book, Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes brings to a close the series of historical studies he began in 1962 with The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, and followed in 1975 and 1987 respectively with The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. It is difficult to imagine that anyone other than Hobsbawm could have approached – much less achieved – the consistently high level of these volumes: taken together, they represent one of the summits of historical writing in the postwar period ...”