KOBA THE DREAD: LAUGHTER AND TWENTY MILLION
by Martin Amis
Cape, £16.99, pp. 306, ISBN 0224063030
Eric Hobsbawm is arguably our greatest living historian – not only Britain’s, but the world’s (as the torrential translation of his oeuvre tends to confirm). The global reach of his knowledge and culture, his formidable linguistic armoury, his love of jazz (although the saxophone was banished by Stalin), and his acute readings of personalities (though not Stalin’s) are invariably conveyed in a prose measured yet fluent. Perhaps there is no substitute for an ZmigrZ background, for schooling in Vienna and Berlin before arriving at Marylebone Grammar School and King’s College, Cambridge. Even the drawback of having an expatriate English father more interested in boxing than ideas was offset by an early death, sad and penurious.
Hobsbawm (like Isaac Deutscher) bucks the trend in one notable respect: as Perry Anderson pointed out, the main impact of immigrant scholars in Britain has been conservative or ‘Cold War liberal’: think of Namier, Popper, Isaiah Berlin and all the other knights.
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