Eric Hobsbawm: a life in history

Abstract

By the time he died in 2012, Eric Hobsbawm was one of the best-known historians in the world. He had made signature contributions to a range of overlapping historical fields, from labour history to the history of nationalism. Hundreds of thousands of people across the world had read his books. And he had developed an unrivalled network of contacts in the Americas, western Europe and south Asia. Yet for all his fame, there is an astonishing paucity of critical work on his life and his ideas. In his range, ambition and his longtime engagement with Marxism, he conformed almost perfectly to the ideal-type of the twentieth-century European intellectual, but there has been nowhere near the same degree of scholarly engagement with him as there has been with figures like Pierre Bourdieu, Hannah Arendt or E. P. Thompson. The publication of Richard Evans's authorized biography of Hobsbawm therefore represents a major milestone. For the first time, a recognized scholar has used newly available archival material to give us an insight into Hobsbawm's inner world and the intricacies of his long career. With the help of a team of research assistants, Evans has delved deep into his subject's papers and unearthed a treasure trove of anecdotes and documents, many of which have been supplemented by interviews with friends and colleagues. It is a testimony to the richness of the material that the book runs to over 800 pages.