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Lectures about Heaven

Thomas Laqueur: Forgiving Germany, 7 June 2007

Five Germanys I Have Known 
by Fritz Stern.
Farrar, Straus, 560 pp., £11.25, July 2007, 978 0 374 53086 0
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... his native Germany. Others were willing to make moral discriminations among Germans after the war. Eric Hobsbawm writes, for example, that neither he nor his fellow ‘largely Jewish “re-educators”’ felt ‘the sort of visceral anti-German reaction’ that knowledge of the camps might have been expected to provoke: ‘Both conviction and realism ...

Going Straight

Neal Ascherson, 17 March 1983

After Long Silence 
by Michael Straight.
Collins, 351 pp., £11.95, March 1983, 0 00 217001 9
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A Matter of Trust: MI5 1945-72 
by Nigel West.
Weidenfeld, 196 pp., £8.95, December 1982, 0 297 78253 3
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... of Communist systems: once in 1949 at an Apostles’ dinner, when he found himself sitting next to Eric Hobsbawm and the subject of Czechoslovakia came up, and once in Washington when Straight launched a noisy diatribe about moral sabotage and subversion against Jozef Winiewicz, then the Polish Ambassador. It doesn’t seem accidental that both are candid ...

Permissiveness

Paul Addison, 23 January 1986

The Writing on the wall: Britain in the Seventies 
by Phillip Whitehead.
Joseph, 438 pp., £14.95, November 1985, 0 7181 2471 5
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... to square the circle. It has taken another great slump, electoral disaster, the teachings of Eric Hobsbawm, and the defeat of the NUM, to awaken Labour activists to the new economic realities. While sensitive to the underlying problems of the Seventies, Whitehead does not argue them through. The narrative of yesterday’s headlines carries him ...

Pornotheology

Jenny Turner: Martin Amis, 22 April 2010

The Pregnant Widow 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 470 pp., £18.99, February 2010, 978 0 224 07612 8
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... the book contorts itself to present these girls with almost bien pensant sympathy. Later, Eric Hobsbawm – ‘a distinguished Marxist historian’ – is cited, and so is the Equal Pay Act, and the National Organisation for Women. And ‘The Female Eunuch … Women’s Estate … Sexual Politics … and Our Bodies, Ourselves’, which ‘all ...

Imagine his dismay

Carlos Fraenkel: Salman Rushdie, 18 February 2016

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights 
by Salman Rushdie.
Cape, 286 pp., £18.99, September 2015, 978 1 910702 03 1
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... I’d suggest that we live in a time of relative moral clarity compared, let’s say, to what Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘Age of Catastrophe’ – the period in Europe between 1914 and 1950 that brought a sense of moral collapse and, along with it, the deep sense of absurdity captured by philosophers and artists from Camus to Beckett. It’s clear ...

Drowned in Eau de Vie

Modris Eksteins: New, Fast and Modern, 21 February 2008

Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond 
by Peter Gay.
Heinemann, 610 pp., £20, November 2007, 978 0 434 01044 8
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... him that Modernism is not totally moribund, and he concludes his book with a smile. By contrast, Eric Hobsbawm ended his blockbuster Age of Extremes, covering roughly the same period, with the word ‘darkness’. How one interprets Modernism depends on what one includes. While its intellectual aspects are important, the wider context of this culture of ...

But I wanted a crocodile

Thomas Meaney: Castro in Harlem, 4 February 2021

Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s 
by Simon Hall.
Faber, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2020, 978 0 571 35306 4
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... It would hardly​ be possible, Eric Hobsbawm once said, to imagine rebels better designed to appeal to the New Left than Castro and his comrades. Despite occasional sneers from Third World elders (Nasser dismissed them as ‘a bunch of Errol Flynns’), Western liberals were just as infatuated as radicals. The New York Times published an admiring three-part profile of Castro from his hideout in the Sierra Maestra in 1957, when he was still a revolutionary newt ...

In the bright autumn of my senescence

Christopher Hitchens, 6 January 1994

In the Heat of the Struggle: Twenty-Five Years of ‘Socialist Worker’ 
by Paul Foot.
Bookmarks, 288 pp., £12.50, November 1993, 0 906224 94 2
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Why You Should Join the Socialists 
by Paul Foot.
Bookmarks, 70 pp., £1.90, November 1993, 0 906224 80 2
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... that, until its deliquescence, the only distinguished remaining member of the Communist Party was Eric Hobsbawm. And, I sometimes suspect, for a similar reason: an old-fashioned reluctance to be a quitter in hard times or a seeker after the empty honours which bourgeois society confers upon the defector. Those who read Foot in this journal or in Private ...
... 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 ...

Du Maurier: A Lament

Jeremy Harding, 24 March 1994

Cigarettes Are Sublime 
by Richard Klein.
Duke, 210 pp., £19.95, February 1994, 0 8223 1401 0
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... it with stiff inhalations of the nose and drawing it up into his nostrils. He made us read Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé and, preparing me for university entrance, allowed me to smoke in moderation, a discipline I would master no better than European history. After school, I smoked in earnest: large quantities of rolling tobacco, the best of ...

The Wonderfulness of Us

Richard J. Evans: The Tory Interpretation of History, 17 March 2011

... 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 ...

Who were they?

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: ‘Thuggee’, 3 December 2009

Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of ‘Thuggee’ 
edited by Kim Wagner.
Oxford, 318 pp., £22.99, January 2009, 978 0 19 569815 2
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... this was no more than ‘colonial myth-making’, as Christopher Bayly put it in the 1990s. With Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s celebrated 1983 formula of ‘the invention of tradition’ in mind, it became common to accuse the British of having ‘discovered’ nothing and ‘invented’ everything in their encounter with India. Reviewing an ...

Tea with Medea

Simon Skinner: Richard Cobb, 19 July 2012

My Dear Hugh: Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and Others 
Frances Lincoln, 240 pp., £20, October 2011, 978 0 7112 3240 2Show More
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... The social history he practised, unlike that of his contemporaries – E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, Albert Soboul and George Rudé – derived from a novelist’s fascination with character rather than from any interest in class structure or commitment to history from below. In his ‘Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian’, the ...

Cite ourselves!

Richard J. Evans: The Annales School, 3 December 2009

The Annales School: An Intellectual History 
by André Burguière, translated by Jane Marie Todd.
Cornell, 309 pp., £24.95, 0 8014 4665 1
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... with my fellow students discussing the relative attractions of British Marxist historians like Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson, German neo-Weberians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, American students of social inequality like Stephan Thernstrom, advocates of a social-anthropological approach such as Keith ...

Staying Alive in the Ruins

Richard J. Evans: Plato to Nato, 22 April 2021

Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after World War Two 
by Paul Betts.
Profile, 536 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 1 78816 109 1
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... of Civilisation series, which brought together a diverse collection of historians including Eric Hobsbawm, Friedrich Heer and Michael Grant to produce single-author volumes on particular time periods and parts of the globe. Underpinning the concept, developed by its enterprising publisher George Weidenfeld, was the French idea of civilisation as ...

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