A few years ago, I wrote a review of Eric Hobsbawm’s last collection of essays and noted
‘Hobsbawm is now 94, and although I have no wish to usher the old boy from the room, I can see his obituaries now. Conservative and liberal writers will say that his loyalty to totalitarianism disfigured his writing, most notably, in his whitewashing of Soviet atrocities in The Age of Extremes, his history of the 20th century. Leftists will say he was the greatest Marxist historian of our times, whose sweeping accounts of the world from the Enlightenment to the present have shaped the way we think. Neither will acknowledge that both have a case.’
I’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s papers to see if I’m right, but I can defend my argument now. Hobsbawm was a great historian with a sweeping vision and an ability to comprehend and communicate the vast movements in human history.
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