Eric Hobsbawm, A Life in History by Richard J. Evans (review)

Hints for potential readers of this worthwhile book. First, this is "a life in history," not an exhaustive analysis of Eric Hobsbawm's writings. Its subtitle. a "life in history" has multiple meanings: as biography, as the life of a great historian, and as a social history of a leading intellectual from childhood through advanced age. The book is very long (662 pages of text, many more with references), but eminently readable. Finally, it is neither pro- or anti-Marxist and will not sharpen one's polemical skills in either direction. Richard Evans is a distinguished British historian and social democrat who seeks to understand Hobsbawm developmentally using literally all available sources – Hobsbawm's diaries, interviews with colleagues, friends, and family, police records, the press, international contacts, literary agents and publishers, and others.

Evans is particularly interested in Hobsbawm's formative years – nearly half the volume. How does an unusually gifted person become an infinitely curious, multi-lingual cosmopolitan with deep attachments to Marxism and an intellectually independent scholar and superb writer? Hobsbawm's own Interesting Times provided a starting point, but Evans adds much more.

Hobsbawm, was a Polish-Jewish naturalized British citizen, his mother Viennese and a published novelist. Born in Alexandria while his father worked for the Egyptian telephone company, he and the family moved to Vienna after 1918 and then faced economic difficulties. During this period, at age 14, Hobsbawm was orphaned and moved again to Berlin to live with relatives. The dying days of the Weimar Republic were the beginnings of Hobsbawm's. Social democracy and liberalism had both failed, leaving militant opposition to the rise of Hitler by German communists as perhaps the only remaining choice to a passionate adolescent. Evans suggests that the communist movement served as "family" to an orphan who became an omnivorous reader of Marxian texts and world literature. The young Hobsbawm also became an apprentice "fieldworker," travelling, experiencing, questioning, contacting people, following up hunches, and, in general, "Hoovering" data to fill his evolving historical frames.

After Hitler took power, Hobsbawm and his guardian-relatives moved to the UK where yet again he faced a new environment. An excellent student, he was accepted at Cambridge in 1936, bearing the reputation of someone "who already knows everything" and winning a scholarship generous enough to finance new travels around Europe. At this point he also joined the British Communist Party. Having evaluated most of Cambridge's historical community in unflattering terms, he eventually found a tutor suitable to his interests in economic history (Mounia Postan). He also became a successful student journalist, an "Apostle" (member of an exclusive group of young intellectuals, many also communist), and received highest honours upon graduation. Following Evans, we discover a young man functioning successfully in a prestigious, somewhat hostile and often socially pretentious new world and also expanding his earlier commitments. Soldiering in World War II, his next stage was a waste, however. As a communist he was stashed away in the UK in places and jobs where he had little contact with other soldiers and was overseen by mi5. After war's ending, he returned to Cambridge for a doctorate and then sought university employment, with initially disappointing results. Publishers refused his book projects, top universities would not hire him, and his first marriage broke down. The academic setbacks were explainable by rejections of Hobsbawm's communist affiliations and Marxist approaches and the fact that Hobsbawm was a synthesizer and not an archival researcher when being the latter was a necessary rite of professional passage. Eventually he secured a job at London's Birkbeck College, which specialized in working and mature students, where he would remain for four decades giving lectures that became the backbones of his mature books. Writing as "Francis Newton," he also became a noted jazz critic and explorer of the lower depths of Bohemian London, both while participating in the stellar Communist historians' group and helping found the eminent journal Past and Present.

Hobsbawm's years of prominence did...