Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20th Century, by Eric Hobsbawm - review

Like many posthumous books from distinguished thinkers, this isn’t one. A book, I mean. Not really. The problem is that nobody seems to buy cobbled-together collections of previously published essays, talks and book reviews. The thing to do if you’re a publisher, therefore, is to give it a title that makes it sound like a book, shoehorn the content into vague, grand-sounding sections (‘Part I: The Predicament of “High Culture” Today’; ‘Part II: The Culture of the Bourgeois World’; ‘Part III: Uncertainties, Science, Religion.’; ‘Part IV: From Art to Myth’) and put it between hard covers for 25 quid.

That said, the situation’s not quite as bald as all that. Eric Hobsbawm, if his preface is to be believed, worked on turning this into a book before his death; and the preoccupations front and centre or under-lying most of these essays are the same — the relationship between culture and society as it shifted with the eclipse of the 19th-century bourgeoisie, and its current state and direction. Nevertheless, such coherence as it has is retrospective. Essays do overlap and repeat material.

I’m aware that, as a lifelong Marxist, Hobsbawn is a hard sell to a Spectator-reading constituency. This magazine’s drink correspondent, indeed, once ended up wearing his drink as a hat after heckling a meeting the historian was addressing with the refrain: ‘Free Pinochet! Jail Hobsbawm!’, and I imagine many readers will agree with the sentiment, even as they deplore his bad manners.

But here’s trying. Whatever you make of his politics, Hobsbawm is a historian of exceptional lucidity, with a staggering range and ease of reference. As a writer he’s uneven, but at his best has a vigorously aphoristic debunking turn of phrase and droll wit. His perspective — he was Jewish and grew up in Vienna and Berlin before settling in the UK — is European rather than narrowly British.