Interesting Times

The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has certainly witnessed 'interesting times', as the Chinese proverb euphemistically puts it. 85 years young, his life runs parallel to the 'short century' (1914-1991) which is the subject of his most widely read work, Age of Extremes. He was born in Egypt, spent his childhood in Vienna, and went to school in Berlin (where, as a young Communist, he witnessed the rise of Nazism). By then both his parents had died and he moved to England with his sister Nancy and aunt Mimi. England has remained his home, a base from which he has explored the four corners of the globe, both physically and academically. He saw the body of Stalin, dined with a master spy in Budapest, translated for Che Guevara in Havana, and spent an evening in Chicago with Mahalia Jackson. But Hobsbawm is first and foremost an historian, and these personal reminiscences take second place to his incisive analysis of the 20th century - Spain, the Cold War, Vietnam, May '68 et al. Being a Marxist of the old school, he cannot resist cataloguing (in somewhat agonizing detail) the dry and largely uneventful world of British Communism. Being Jewish, and proud of it, he is nonetheless able to say that he has 'no emotional obligations to the practices of an ancestral religion and even less to the small, militarist, politically aggressive nation-state which asks for my solidarity on racial grounds...'. He manages all this, and much more, with characteristic rigour and (since it is an autobiography) a degree of self-scrutiny. Yet in spite of the pain he feels, witnessing the defeat of Communism, acknowledging the mistakes and abuses made in its name, he remains an optimist, and a fighter. His final words are a rallying call to the Left: 'Let us not disarm. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.' Amen to that. (Kirkus UK)