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“... with a tide of wordy socialism. As an undergraduate Communist, he wrote his first pamphlet (with Eric Hobsbawm) – a defence of the Soviet invasion of Finland – and wrote prolifically for university magazines as well as editing the University’s Socialist Club Journal. On being called up, he soon decided that what his regiment (the 21st ...”

“... of domestic fuel consumption was provided by coal).Dense fogs persisted through the 1930s. Young Eric Hobsbawm arrived in London in 1933, describing in his diary a Particular in which ‘Here am I, in my world, ten metres’ circumference. Beyond that, whiteness that sucks everything up.’ Fog set in again after the Second World War, with a devastating ...”

“... Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire occupies a special place in what has grown, without the author’s originally intending it, into the final volume of a trilogy in which Hobsbawm ‘makes sense’, on the grand scale, of the 19th century – of the world which flourished before, and led to, the catastrophe of 1914 ...”

“... years a leading inspiration for what is inadequately called ‘labour history’: in the hands of Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson et al it is more the biography of a class than a narrative or analysis of politics. A similar spirit has animated the study of the intellectual underworld, and the interrelationship of magic, religion and science. Women’s ...”

“... Marx – he was easily the winner, ahead of Hume, Plato, Karl Popper and others. Asked to comment, Eric Hobsbawm said he thought that the fall of Soviet Communism had at last allowed people to disentangle Marxism from Moscow. Francis Wheen, the author of a recent biography of Marx, made a similar point. The man had finally emerged from under the political ...”

“... of new civilisations rather than the perpetuation of familiar ones. In The Age of Extremes Eric Hobsbawm sketched an overview of the new terrain: a capitalism disoriented by its own victory, because deprived of serious alternatives. The barbarian hinterland and most pre-capitalist social traditions had only one way to go. ‘Non-economic group ...”

“... of slow maturation towards civil homogeneity. At the 1977 Congress of Gramsci Studies in Florence, Eric Hobsbawm argued that ‘Gramsci’s strategy derived from his concept – wholly original in Marxist terms – of the working class as part of the Nation. As a matter of fact, I am convinced,’ he said, ‘that up to the present he is the only Marxist ...”

“... They contributed to a 1952 issue, edited and illustrated by Mark Boxer; so did Thom Gunn and Eric Hobsbawm. Hugh wrote a story about Monsieur Alphonse, a maître d’hôtel at a place called The Panache, and an appreciation of Benjamin Constant. The contributor’s note for Hugh says: A prominent Union Speaker. Has contributed to Granta regularly ...”

“... of colleagues he suspected of Communist sympathies, retained a deep respect for the Party member Eric Hobsbawm as a historian and helped him to get a US visa. Neither was he such a Little Englander as he seemed. Visiting Paris, he was enthralled by the work of Fernand Braudel and the Annales School, and complained that they were ‘totally excluded from ...”

“... with false consciousness that ‘who said or wrote precisely what doesn’t matter much.’ Eric Hobsbawm, in Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990), went further: nationalism involves so much ‘belief in what is patently wrong’ that ‘no serious historian of nation and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist’. From Mazzini to ...”

“... portrait hung opposite the historical landscape, what light does Interesting Times throw on Eric Hobsbawm’s vision of the 20th century, and overall narrative of modernity?1 In overarching conception, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and Age of Extremes can be regarded as a single enterprise – a tetralogy which has no ...”

“... favour of this kind of history is that ‘anything that has been condemned by Carr, Thompson and Hobsbawm must have something to recommend it.’ He believes that the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité ‘have time and again been shown to be completely mutually exclusive’. ‘If,’ he continues, ‘we accept that there is no such thing as ...”

“... What​ Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘short 20th century’ is supposed to have ended in 1989 with the United States winning the Cold War. Yet today America faces a powerful and assertive China, a one-party state with an official ideology it calls 21st-century Marxism, which is busy building a powerful military on the back of an economy set to become the world’s biggest in the foreseeable future ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”