University of Hawai'i Press
  • "The strange and often alien world of the past"The Year in the United Kingdom

What relationship should a biographer have to their subject's politics? Which produces most insight: objective distance or sympathetic identification? Richard J. Evans's Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) describes its subject adopting—or being adopted by—Communism as a Jewish teenager in Berlin 1931 and 1932, and persisting with it until his death in 2012. He stayed when many left the party after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising and the revelation of the extent of Stalin's crimes in 1956; he even remained a Communist after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the 1980s. In Evans's telling, the movement filled the gap left by early orphanhood and then, though he did not consider himself a refugee, displacement from Europe to England.

For Evans, this need to belong explains what would otherwise seem an incompatible enthusiasm for the British establishment: Hobsbawm joined the British Academy in 1976, and the Athenaeum Club in 1983. Towards the end of his life, he became president of the Hay Literary Festival, where he spoke in the Barclays Wealth tent. In 1998 he accepted the order of the Companion of Honour from the Queen herself, even if he turned down a knighthood. But as Hobsbawm was afforded the genre of retrospective interview associated with National Treasure status, he was not allowed to forget the contradictions of his position. Evans transcribes an exchange asked on BBC TV by the Canadian interviewer Michael Ignatieff in full:

IGNATIEFF:

In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a Communist?

HOBSBAWM:

… Probably not.

IGNATIEFF:

Why?

HOBSBAWM:

Because in a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world [End Page 171] being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing … the sacrifices were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and excessively great. But I'm looking back at it now and I'm saying that because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I'm not sure.

IGNATIEFF:

What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?

HOBSBAWM:

Yes.

The same line of questioning was taken, a few months later, on "Britain's longest-running radio show" (Midgely), that normally gentle and unadversarial institution of Middle England Desert Island Discs (589). It presupposes an unreflexive historical self-satisfication: the "sacrifices" involved in the "Soviet experiment" were not be forgotten, but the millions of deaths involved in achieving the "today" of living standards, radiant or otherwise, in Britain or the United States do not come into the equation, because they generally happened in colonies. Priyamvada Gopal's Insurgent Empire, which also appeared in 2019, had more to say on how—contrary to the usual narrative—dissent at the Imperial "periphery" on such issues had shaped dissent at its heart. Tony Judt's critique, however, was that Hobsbawm "refuses to stare evil in the face and call it by its name; he never engages the moral as well as the political heritage of Stalin and his works" (qtd. in Evans, Eric Hobsbawm 618). On this front, Evans was happy to defend Hobsbawm: "there was something of the Inquisition about Judt's shrill exhortations to Eric to recant or be damned" (618).

Evans, who accepted his knighthood in 2012 and the Regius Professorship of Modern History at the University of Cambridge in 2008, knew Hobsbawm personally. Although he broadly endorses Hobsbawm's project as a historian, he makes a disclaimer early on: "I have always been a social democrat in my political convictions" (ix–x). Evans stops short of referring to himself as a biographer when he adds that "the task the historian has to fulfil above all others is to enter into an understanding of the strange and often alien world of the past, not to condemn it on the one hand or identify with it on the other" (x).

Evans is best known as a British historian of Germany, and specifically that area of the British public's ceaseless and probably even mounting preoccupation, the Third Reich. He sketches out the Weimar backdrop of Hobsbawm's childhood with the ease we might expect. While the nineteen other books listed on this biography's flysheet show his writing steadily expanding out from an academic audience to a broader public, Telling Lies About Hitler (2002; Lying About Hitler in the United States)—his account of the Irving v Penguin Books Ltd controversy—made him an academic celebrity. Evans was called upon as an expert witness in the libel case brought by David Irving against Penguin Books, publisher of Deborah Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust. As dramatized in the 2016 film Denial, Evans's meticulously assembled and presented evidence of Irving's distortions and [End Page 172] misrepresentations prevailed.

Evans's public profile has been kept up by his enthusiasm for public rows in newspaper and magazine review and letters pages. One such row, dating back to 2013 (Evans, "Michael Gove's"), began with an attack on sweepingly ideological changes made to the school history curriculum by Michael Gove, the ex-journalist, later twice-failed candidate for leadership of the Conservative Party (2016 and 2019), and then education secretary. (In 2019, the London Review of Books permitted Evans the occasion of a biography of Gove to settle scores.) The debate here centered on the historical uses of the memory of the First World War. The winner of the Conservative leadership contest in 2019, Boris Johnson, came in for similar treatment from Evans over his 2014 biography of Winston Churchill. Slipping into the familiar cadences of essay-grading, Evans judged that "in a book that involves a good deal of modern European history, Boris the Eurosceptic clearly doesn't find it necessary to master the details" ("'One man who made history'"). More recently, Evans wrote an obituary for the historian Norman Stone which ended with this assessment:

Journalists often described him as "one of Britain's leading historians", but in truth he was nothing of the kind, as any serious member of the profession will tell you. The former prime minister, [Edward] Heath, was wrong about many things, but he was surely right when he said of Stone during his time in Oxford: "Many parents of Oxford students must be both horrified and disgusted that the higher education of our children should rest in the hands of such a man."

Perhaps Evans's juiciest spat, however, has been with the novelist A. N. Wilson, not a member of the Conservative government's cabinet, but one solidly aligned with its culture and newspapers. In 2012, drawing on the reading and imaginative work involved in his 2007 novel about the relationship between Hitler and Wagner's daughter-in-law, Winnie and Wolf, Wilson published a short biography of Adolf Hitler. Evans's review had the texture of a trodden-on patch. "What might do as background research for a novel won't do as preparation for a serious work of history. Nor does he seem to have thought very hard or taken much care over what little reading he has done," Evans complained: "It would take more space than is available here to list all the mistakes in the book" ("Hitler"). Wilson responded in an exchange of letters addressing Evans's points, particularly on the front of having not read the sources in German, and defending himself on the ground that the book was for a more general readership (Singh). But a proper shot at revenge came with the publication of Evans's Hobsbawm book. Though Evans was on home turf with the historiography of the Third Reich, he is not, as Susan Pedersen put it in the London Review of Books, "one of nature's biographers." Wilson, however, can claim at least fourteen outright biographies among the more hybrid works of life-writerly nonfiction he has written since 1980's The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott. [End Page 173]

Evans was by now surely expecting it, and Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History contains a preemptive strike. Summing up the political controversy that reemerged after Hobsbawm's death, Evans described the "typically impulsive piece" Wilson had written for the tabloid Daily Mail, "without bothering to think about the subject, let alone presenting any evidence, that Eric had 'hated Britain' and suggested he might have been a Soviet spy. His books were little more than propaganda and would not be read in the future. His reputation would 'sink without trace.'"1 The real sting came with Evans starting the next paragraph by switching to "tributes from serious historians …" (648).

Wilson's review appeared in The Times on January 26, 2019. Some of it focused on the author. "An over-zealous researcher, Evans does not know how to sift material," Wilson parried: "clearly, for Evans, Hobsbawm was a historian in the grand league of Gibbon, von Ranke, Harnack and Burckhardt, but nothing in Evans's sloppily written pages persuaded me to think he is right" ("Book of the week"). The last claim in particular was not helped by Wilson misattributing a description of The Age of Revolution (1963)—"the innocent reader has no idea why the matter tastes so good, and digests Marxism as if it was a stimulating spice" (Evans, Eric Hobsbawm 401)—to Hobsbawm himself rather than the Communist philosopher Ernst Fischer (Wilson, "Book of the week").

Returning to the themes of his 2012 "man who hated Britain" piece on Hobsbawm, Wilson argued that "like most western liberals," Evans "half-believes that the Marxists might have been correct in their analysis of history." For Wilson, the equation of author's to subject's politics is thus: "such liberals want to believe that the Marxists were liberal at heart. Evans claims that Hobsbawm may have been a communist as a man, but on the page he was more nuanced, more like Evans" (Wilson, "Book of the week"). This is a fairer critique. Evans does tend toward the British, establishment reflex for the recuperation of radical thought, separating a Marxist thinker's insight from the analytical framework used to produce it:

Throughout his career as an historian, Eric was pulled one way by his Communist and, more broadly, his Marxist commitment, and another by his respect for the facts, the documentary record and the findings and arguments of other historians whose work he acknowledged and respected. At some points of the three volumes, the former wins out over the latter, but overall it is the latter that prevails.

In this, he is going a step further than Hugh Trevor-Roper, whom Evans paraphrases as arguing "Eric's Communism could and should be separated from his Marxism, which, 'as a contribution to historical philosophy', might 'continue, revised and modified, to enrich our studies'" (Evans, Eric Hobsbawm 608).

The main UK launch event for Evans's book was at Senate House, the imposing University of London Library building next to his and Hobsbawm's old employer Birkbeck College. It had also been chosen for the latter's memorial service six [End Page 174] years earlier; Hobsbawm had stipulated "DON'T ACCEPT ANY LOCATION IN BIRKBECK ITSELF, AS THERE ARE NO SUITABLE ONES" (qtd. in Evans, Eric Hobsbawm 656). The timing of this second event, however, meant that guests and speakers—who included Professor Donald Sassoon, one of Hobsbawm's PhD supervisees, and Martin Jacques, one of Hobsbawm's editors at Marxism Today—broke a boycott staged by the Independent Workers of Great Britain in support of subcontracted cleaners working at the University (Rawlinson).

The closest precedent had come in 2010, with Tristram Hunt crossing a University and Colleges Union picket line at Queen Mary, University of London to deliver a lecture on "Marx, Engels and the Making of Marxism" (James). Hunt, the Labour Party's then shadow secretary of state for education, had told the pickets he supported their right to strike but was not a member of the union; a colleague replied perhaps he should be. "Should we care about a philosopher's lifestyle or are his ideas all that matters?" the Labour Party grandee Roy Hattersley had asked in a review of The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (Hattersley), the biography Hunt had published in 2009. "Engels would never admit any contradiction between his gentleman's lifestyle and egalitarian ideas," Hunt himself wrote, "but his critics did then and certainly do now" (8). Even before the picket line encounter, the London Review of Books had described Hunt as an "interesting choice as Engels's biographer. No other historian waved the flag quite as vigorously during the Cool Britannia era of New Labour" (Taylor).

Hunt interviewed Hobsbawm in 2002 and again in 2011, shortly before his death, at the Hay literary festival; The Frock-Coated Communist approvingly quotes Hobsbawm several times. In the document that warned off Birkbeck as a location for his memorial, Hobsbawm had also suggested Hunt as a possible speaker. The connection is one incarnation of the sense, in Evans's book, that Hobsbawm was an "intellectual founding father" (522) of New Labour, whether he liked it or not. Particularly disillusioned with the party after the Iraq War, Hobsbawm told Evans he thought Tony Blair "Thatcher in trousers" (626), but held out high, ultimately disappointed hopes for his chancellor and successor, Gordon Brown, and hosted him at home for dinner parties.

After the Senate House Hobsbawm event, the chairwoman of the University of London branch of the International Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), Maritza Castillo Calle, told The Guardian, "It is disappointing that these respected academics chose to ignore the boycott in order to talk about a Marxist historian that we are sure would be on our side in this struggle" (Rawlinson). Replying in the same paper, Evans claimed he had been "given no notice of the boycott until it was far too late to call the meeting off," and described taking leaflets into the event for audience members to read, insisting that he supported the union in their struggle. But Evans also added that Hobsbawm "always despised leftwing sectarianism. The fact that the IWGB union split away from Unison and Unite to operate independently would have struck him as undermining the trade union movement" ("Eric Hobsbawm"). The subject here was sympathizing with the views of the biographer. [End Page 175]

The veteran letter-writer and trade unionist Keith Flett responded, tongue partly in cheek, by arguing that materialists can only speculate on what Hobsbawm might have thought. Even if we put this aside, should Evans have been ventriloquizing the political judgment of the younger, less-establishment Hobsbawm, the older Companion of Honour, or simply following his own instincts? Could any of these distinctly twentieth-century options do justice to the unprecedented situation faced in a different century's economic realities by "a new and dynamic union which represents mainly low paid migrant workers, such as outsourced cleaners and security guards, workers in the so-called 'gig economy'" (IWGB)? From a position ostensibly to the left of Evans, the historian Emile Chabal is currently working on his own biography of Hobsbawm, and it will be interesting to see if and how this episode, with its restatement of the essential tension surrounding Hobsbawm's position in canonical British historiography, appears. One conclusion it is possible to make is that, almost regardless of how they have positioned themselves in their work, the public engagements expected of biographers put them in a less nuanced situation than is possible on the page. Unless the book is clearly a debunking, they can find themselves a kind of avatar for their subjects.

Tom Overton

Tom Overton is writing John Berger's biography for Allen Lane Books. He edited Portraits: John Berger on Artists and Landscapes: John Berger on Art (2015) for Verso Books, and is Archive Curator at the Barbican Centre and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. Twitter: @tw_overton; website: overton.tw.

Note

1. In 2013, the Daily Mail ran a piece by Geoffrey Levy on the death of the Marxist, Jewish academic Ralph Miliband—also the father of the Labour Party politicians David and Ed—under the title "The man who hated Britain: Red Ed's pledge to bring back socialism is a homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country."

Works Cited

Evans, Richard J. Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History. Little, Brown, 2019.
———. "Eric Hobsbawm would not have backed University of London boycott." The Guardian, 11 Feb. 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/feb/11/eric-hobsbawm-would-not-have-backed-university-of-london-boycott?iframe=true. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
———. "Hitler: A Short Biography." New Statesman, 12 Mar. 2012, https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2012/03/hitler-wilson-german-british. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
———. "Michael Gove's history wars." The Guardian, 13 July 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/13/michael-gove-teaching-history-wars. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
———. "Norman Stone obituary." The Guardian, 25 June 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/25/norman-stone-obituary. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
———. "'One man who made history' by another who seems just to make it up: Boris on Churchill." New Statesman, 13 Nov. 2014, https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2014/11/one-man-who-made-history-another-who-seems-just-make-it-borischurchill. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Flett, Keith. "Richard Evans should have cancelled his book launch at Senate House." The Guardian, 13 Feb. 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/13/richard-evans-should-have-cancelled-his-book-launch-at-senate-house. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Gopal, Priyamvada. Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. Verso, 2019.
Hattersley, Roy. "A Communist and a Gentleman." The Guardian, 26 Apr. 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/26/frock-coated-communist-tristram-hunt. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Hunt, Tristram. The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. Allen Lane, 2009.
International Workers of Great Britain [IWGB]. "About Us," https://iwgb.org.uk/en/page/rules/about. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
James, Luke. "Tristram Hunt crosses picket line to lecture on Marx." Morning Star, 11 Feb. 2014, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-8b5c-Tristram-Hunt-crosses-picket-line-tolecture-on-Marx#.UvtJtkJ_trc. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Levy, Geoffrey. "The man who hated Britain: Red Ed's pledge to bring back socialism is a homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country." Daily Mail, 27 Sept. 2013, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2435751/Red-Eds-pledge-bring-socialism-homage-Marxist-father-Ralph-Miliband-says-GEOFFREY-LEVY.html. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Midgley, Neil. "Desert Island Discs: Britain's longest-running radio show." The Telegraph, 29 Jan. 2012, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9045319/Desert-Island-Discs-Britains-longest-running-radio-show.html. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Pedersen, Susan. "I want to love it." London Review of Books, vol. 41, no. 8, 18 Apr. 2019, pp. 13–16.
Rawlinson, Kevin. "Talk about Marxist historian under fire for breaching workers' rights boycott." The Guardian, 7 Feb. 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/feb/07/marxist-academics-accused-of-undermining-workers-protest. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Singh, Anita. "The Hitler biography that started a war." Daily Telegraph, 5 Apr. 2012, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9189569/The-Hitler-biography-that-started-a-war.html. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Taylor, Miles. "Town Planner?" The London Review of Books, vol. 31, no. 24, 17 Dec. 2009, pp. 26–27, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n24/miles-taylor/town-planner. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Wilson, A. N. "Book of the week: On the wrong side of history." The Times, 26 Jan. 2019, p. 11.
———. "He hated Britain and excused Stalin's genocide. But was hero of the BBC and the Guardian, Eric Hobsbawm a TRAITOR too?" Daily Mail, 2 Oct. 2012, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2211961/Eric-Hobsbawm-He-hated-Britain-excused-Stalins-genocide-But-traitor-too.html. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
———. The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott. Oxford UP, 1980.
———. Winnie and Wolf: A Novel. Hutchinson, 2007.

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