Eric the Red

Sir Richard Evans, retired regius professor of history at Cambridge, has always been a hefty historian. The densely compacted facts in his books, the evidence of an inexorable mind incessantly at work, the knock-out blows that he has dealt to adversaries from David Irving upwards — they all characterise authoritative books by a hard-man among scholars. But in retirement, it seems, the great man is mellowing. His latest book — a biography of his friend, the historian Eric Hobsbawm — is a masterpiece of gentle empathy.

Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria, where his father (a naturalised British citizen of Polish origins) worked for the Egyptian Post & Telegraph service. His mother’s family were jewellers in Vienna. The family left Alexandria for the Austrian capital soon after the end of the first world war. Hobsbawm began intensive reading at the age of ten and never stopped. He was already prodigiously literate when he was orphaned at 14.