On a weekend in October 1955, MI5 agents raided this house in north London. One of its occupants, Ronald Berger, was known to be storing a large number of files for the British Communist Party. While Berger was away for the weekend, a team swooped in, removed the documents from the house, took them to their headquarters in Mayfair, copied them, and returned them before Berger came home. Over 48,000 documents were copied in what became known as ‘Operation Party Piece’. Among the documents were questionnaires completed by British Communist Party members. And among those, the autobiography of a young academic. This is a copy of Eric Hobsbawm's 'autobiography', as it's called, which was submitted to the Communist Party. We don't have the questions but we can work them out, because the answer to question 11 is 'petty bourgeois'. He states in this questionnaire that he joined the Communist Party in Cambridge in 1936 and says: 'I expect the combination of Berlin just before Hitler came to power and rebelling against the family got me to think of myself as a red'. He then goes on to say that he feels rather cut off from the masses, and even from ordinary party work in his professional life. 'On the whole I don't feel that I've done what I might for the party or that I’ve been advancing in my capacity to do so. My sort of professional work is probably the best I can do, but I'd quite like if possible to have more to do with factory workers'. His frustration seems to be echoed and to a degree mocked by by MI5, who write in a report shortly after this that he is a 'tireless and tiresome organiser of petitions and champion of lost causes', and that probably pretty accurately, you know, reflects what he was thinking of himself in this period. Eric Hobsbawm was an unusual historian. For a start he sold millions of books. Well Eric Hobsbawm was in the end, I think, the world's most widely read historian. He's a great writer, he's not just a great historian he's a great writer. It can have the effect I feel when you're reading him of making you feel a bit cleverer than you normally think you are. You're kind of raised up a level. You hold on: 'ah yes, I see!'. He specialised in being a generalist. His work ranging from studies of jazz, Balkan banditry and Peruvian peasant movements, to an entire history of the world from 1789 to 1991. He was easily bored, yes. I mean my mother used to say I don't know how you can live with a man who every day, you know, you've got to say something new. For Hobsbawm, being a historian was not just a way of coming to terms with the past, but also being part of, perhaps even shaping, the history he saw being made around him. A history he was written into before he started writing it himself. This is about a thousand pages of data and intelligence collected on Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm. And I remember, I said Eric, should I join the British Communist Party? And he looked at me and said: 'You must be completely mad, of course not! I joined back in the 30s when, you know, it was the threat of fascism, but now you'll be just wasting your time fighting against the Stalinist for no reason at all.’ Basically a sort of unofficial biography of one of the 20th century's most dazzling and accomplished historians. I've been conscious of, as it were, living in history for a very long time, but that is essentially because at a crucial stage, you know, when I was, whatever it is, a young teenager, I was lucky, yes lucky enough to live in Berlin just in the last years when Hitler came to power, and if you don't feel that you are part of world history at that time you never will. Hobsbawm's path to Berlin began in Egypt in 1917. His father, Percy, on the left here, was English and working in Alexandria for the British-run Postal and Telegraph Service. His mother, Nelly, in the middle, was Austrian and on holiday with her parents when she met Percy at the Sporting Club. They married in 1915 and Eric was born two years later. Well his parents were absolute diametric opposites. His father was a man who liked sport, and he didn't get on very well with Eric, who was always reading, and he didn't like that. His mother was wonderful, adored him right from the word go. Like a mother she bonded with her son. 1917 was the year the first jazz record was produced in New York, The Original Dixieland Jazz Band playing the 'Livery Stable Blues'. As Hobsbawm was to write many years later, it provides a convenient historical marker for the birth of the Jazz Age. And it was also the year of the October Revolution in Russia, the defining event of Hobsbawm's times. One of the crucial consequences of the crisis whose incubation I study was indeed the Russian Revolution, coming partly out of that, partly out of the war. As it were the centrepiece of an era of social revolution, of potential social revolution, which for one thing determines the international scene to this day. In 1919, Egypt too was on the brink of revolution, so the Hobsbawms moved to Vienna to be near Nelly's family. But things began to go really badly wrong, the economy was not doing well, there was massive inflation after the war, his father found it very difficult to get a job and make a living, and then suddenly died of a heart attack. Yes, hasn't changed much. When we first came to Vienna we used to live up in that second floor, the big flat. Then my father died, grandparents moved in to a smaller flat. We were in the spare room, my mother and my sister and myself. Much the same as before. Nelly was barely able to support Eric and his sister Nancy with her work as a translator, and her health deteriorated. In 1931 she was admitted to a sanatorium with tuberculosis. Often his visits to his mother were in hospital, and Eric sort of adjusted, is what I get from our conversations, adjusted to the fact that he was the strong one, even though he was a little boy, and she was the weak one. Nelly died in 1931, and Eric and Nancy moved to Berlin to live with Nelly's sister, Gretel, and her husband, Sydney. Hobsbawm looked back at this period in a piece for the LRB in 2008. I spent the most formative time of my life, the years 1931-33, as a Gymnasiast and would-be Communist militant, in the dying Weimar Republic. He came into a situation in 1931 where the whole political system of the Weimar Republic was in complete meltdown. There was a deep, deep economic depression triggered by the great crash, capitalism looked as if it was on the skids. The trouble about the period when Hitler came to power, what people don't understand is the feeling that we lived, really, in an interim. There wasn't a world, the old world had gone to pieces at the end of World War One, and what is more, between 1929 and 1933, what remained of the world was visibly breaking down. There didn't seem to be the slightest alternative to, I mean, either a revolutionary solution or the world simply going down the drain. For young people in Berlin in particular, as others have told me, who went through that, the choice seemed to be only between the Communists and the Nazis. The Social Democrats, the middle of the road, left-wing party, had been discredited by their tacit support for the government that made austerity measures and cuts and so on, and so Eric decided he was going to be a Communist. He couldn't be a Nazi, he was Jewish by origin for one thing, and then he was English and couldn't share in the, in the nationalist extremism of the Nazis. So he started reading Communist literature. I went and told one of my teachers I was communist and he asked me some questions. He said you don't know what you're talking about go into the library and read some stuff. And you did. And I did, that's how it started. It was extremely exciting. The Communist Party could throw a hundred thousand people onto the streets at a couple of hours notice. And Eric, in fact, went on the last big demonstration of the Communists in Berlin just before Hitler came to power. Adolf Hitler, leader of the German national movement, is made chancellor of Germany and Berlin goes wild in celebration of his victory. I can still see myself walking home from school with my sister on the cold afternoon of the 30 January 1933, reflecting on what the news of Hitler's appointment as chancellor meant. And even as the Hitler victory was announced and the torchlight parades began, communist agitators began milling in the streets in protest. They posted handbills calling for a nationwide general strike. As they posted their bills, violence erupted on the streets of Berlin. Hobsbawm was among those posting pamphlets through people's letterboxes. He wrote: 'We would go into the apartment buildings and, starting on the top floor, push the leaflets into each flat until we came out the front door panting with the effort and looking for signs of danger.' In the spring of 1933, Hobsbawm's uncle moved them all to London. The first thing that I thought when i came to England, frankly, England was an enormous bore. After the extraordinary excitement of living in Germany. I tried to explain it in school to my English school fellows many years later, I said: supposing you were a journalist who had been reporting on Manhattan and your editor said, now from tomorrow you'll be getting to Omaha. That's how I felt when I came to England, you see. But Hobsbawm soon settled into English life. He attended Marylebone grammar school, where he thrived, and was already producing Marxist interpretations for his history classes. But the fact is I'm not sure that if I had stayed in the continent I would have become a historian. I got an interest in history because I became communist and so I read the communist manifesto, and anybody reads the first pages of this is bound to develop an interest in history. But it was coming to England, where history was an important part of the teaching, it was in an English secondary school and in an English university that I became a historian. As he wrote in his diary when he was 17: ‘I do my best to live intensely, and with success. So i'm training myself to get as much as possible out of my limited personal experience, aesthetically and otherwise, and to enlarge my small experience through books.’ It wasn't just through books, though. In the school holidays he accompanied his uncle Sidney on business trips to Paris. And one of those trips in 1936 was the first Bastille Day celebrations after the popular front, a kind of left liberal and socialist combination, a coalition with communist support, had come to power, and this is a period of immense hope and rejoicing for the left. Eric's uncle Sidney, who worked in film, was there with a crew to capture the occasion, and Eric was with him. As he wrote to his cousin Ron: 'Can you imagine, a million people on the streets quite crazy with joy, absolutely dead drunk with their consciousness of unity and strength!' So I think France was very important to him in those years, and the Popular Front I think for him in the 30s and 40s remained – popular in the sense of the anti-fascist front, the front of the left – remained something of a political ideal within which communism could work. In 1936 Hobsbawm won a place at King's College, Cambridge to read history. He was the first person in his family and from his school to go to university, and it was at Cambridge that he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. The Soviet Union's interventions to help the Republican forces against Franco in the Spanish Civil War were drawing many students to the Communist Party, but for Hobsbawm it was also a time when his differences with the party became apparent. He felt that the communists in Cambridge were focusing much too narrowly on political issues, and so he gave up editing the Communist Part student party newsletter and edited The Granta instead (it was called 'The' Granta in those days), which is a general sort of non-political student paper and in that capacity he had a whale of a time. So when he graduated with a double starred First, top degree, in 1939 he had this enormous breadth of experience. After taking his degree, Eric intended to carry on researching for a PhD, but history intervened. So Eric did not have what's generally known as a 'good war'. He was drafted into the Royal Engineers, and as a terribly impractical man it was about the worst possible place for him, building bridges and that kind of thing. Hobsbawm managed to get himself transferred to the army educational corps, where as a fluent German speaker with experience of Hitler's Germany, he felt he could be of more use. It was here that he first came to the attention of British Intelligence. This is where Eric Hobsbawm first gets stuck on the flypaper of the secret state. It's here in this letter. Hobsbawm in 1942 is serving in the army in the educational corps and he's organising, and because he's a fluent German speaker obviously he's giving lectures about Germany, and to that end he writes to a German friend of his: My dear Kahle – he writes to Hans Kahle, who's running something called the Free German Brigade in England, which is suspected by MI5 to be a front for espionage activities. But he's invited by by Hobsbawm to give a lecture, simply, to the local army units. This is what gets Hobsbawm onto the radar of MI5, he writes this letter to somebody whose letters are being intercepted as a matter of course. So immediately MI5 want to look for the reasons for Hobsbawm links to Kahle. MI5 discovered that Hobsbawm was already a Communist Party member, which wasn't illegal, of course. So they decided to investigate his family in London. Ah yes, the occupants of the suspect's home, note that he's become a suspect already. One Broadfields, Headstone Lane, Harrow. R. Henry Birkwood Hobsbawm and his wife Isobel. As to Henry what they have to say is that 'he's been described by a reliable informant as a sneering critical type of person, harsh of speech half Jew in appearance.' Not uncommon language for this period, I have to say. We should remember that, of course, during the war the Soviet Union was our ally, and indeed there were many people in the secret services who were doing all they could to produce propaganda to the effect of, you know, Uncle Joe is really a very avuncular, kindly figure and we can't win the war without him. Despite this, MI5 were anxious to keep tabs on Hobsbawm. MI5 had started checking on him because he'd been using his position in the army educational corps to make propaganda for the opening up of a second front, which was Stalin's demand for the West to invade, already in 1942, to relieve the pressure on the Soviet forces in the east. And this was felt to be interfering in the political direction of the war, so he was moved about by MI5. This is where he was, he'd asked for a posting abroad in 1944, and this is what comes back to the army. 'The security service is of the opinion that from the internal security angle it would be very much better if he remained in this country where watch on his activities can much more easily be kept than anywhere abroad.' The only thing they could find for him to do for the rest of the war was to send him to Cheltenham to teach handicrafts in a military hospital. After the war Hobsbawm began a PhD back in Cambridge, but despite his glittering academic record, he failed to get a teaching job there and was forced to pursue less conventional avenues for his career. He got himself a job in 1947 at Birkbeck in London, which was and is London's college for part-time, evening mature students. He started pitching ideas to BBC Radio's Third Programme, and they commissioned him, again much to the horror of MI5. MI5 were appalled that they hadn't managed to stop him entering the BBC and so they write immediately to the BBC saying, 'you may care to know for future reference that this man has a communist history dating from 1936'. He's on a list of speakers and scriptwriters which is filed by MI5, so they're keeping constant surveillance on who's taking the microphone at the BBC. But it's clear that doors were closing and there were areas of British public life in which Eric Hobsbawm would not be allowed to enter. Confined by the establishment to what they hoped would be a harmless corner of academia, Hobsbawm focused on becoming a historian. I've had luck to belong to a generation which transformed the teaching of history, and the practice of history. Essentially it was by trying to fertilise traditional history, historical and institutional narrative, by marrying it to or getting inspiration from the social sciences. In the 1930s and 40s the new generation went for this, and after the war we won. He came to history through Marxism. Marxism is above all a historical doctrine, it's a set of ideas and theories about history, but he also had this much broader approach to it and for that he I think had to thank the influence of the French Annales school. Now, like Marxism, the Annales school – Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre in particular – were social scientists. They conceived of history as the central social science in which would gather together all the other social sciences. You had to approach history in a very broad way, nothing was off limits. The battleground for one of Hobsbawm's first big historical debates was the Economic History Review. In 1957 he wrote an article there arguing that, contrary to the orthodox view, the standard of living of the British working class declined in the early years of the industrial revolution. And this aroused a lot of controversy because he was now in the Cold War and so Cold War historians thought of this as a kind of Soviet-Marxist-Communist line, which in many ways it was, though Eric's writing is more sophisticated, I think. Hobsbawm thought there was no good evidence to support the idea that living standards improved for the working class in these decades. Quite the opposite. He argues, for example, that meat consumption went down based on the weight of beef sold at Smithfield Market, and that unemployment went up based on, among other things, the number of vagrants recorded along the Great North Road. He got into an enormous controversy with, in particular, the Oxford economic historian R.M. Hartwell, and this then ranged on through the pages of the Economic History Review for quite a long time. Immensely fruitful, still being debated today. I think, ultimately, he won in some ways. So I think it's quite widely accepted now that insofar as you can prove it, the standard of living of the working class did decline in the early decades of the industrial revolution, but then when you look in the late 19th century there's no question that it was actually improving, and there all sorts of ways in which I think the kinds of evidence he relied on were only a smallish part of the picture. I've always thought this is such an odd thing, I mean, no Marxist thesis is entailed in that. I mean, if anything, Marx was always clear that capitalism is better than feudalism You know, not terribly original but certainly something, you know, it would be very difficult to sustain the opposite. Just after the war, Hobsbawm joined a number of fellow left-wing historians, such as E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, in forming the Communist Party Historians Group, to put into practice their new methods of Marxist history. And in 1952 some of them started a new historical journal, Past and Present. Hobsbawm was in search of big ideas, and in the 1950s, as in later in life, he found them in Italy. Hobsbawm went out to Italy in the 1950s, and at the same time became interested through Communist Party intellectuals in some of the struggles that took place in the south, not just at the time, there were struggles going on, but also going back to the 1890s and the 19th century. Through conversations with intellectuals, local leaders, peasants, anyone he could find, Hobsbawm started thinking about the diverse local struggles and revolts of the common people, spread across different regions, countries and centuries, as a single area of study. Some of those struggles were what we might call socialist struggles, like the Fasci Siciliani, which was a great collective struggle in the 1890s over land and democracy which was crushed by the Italian state, but left a legacy. And some of those were different kinds of struggles against the state, which he called 'social banditry', and often individual crime, struggles against the centralisation of the Italian state. In his 1959 book, Primitive Rebels, Hobsbawm describes the social bandit, the outlaw who becomes a hero for the oppressed and enters popular mythology. He writes: 'In one sense banditry is a rather primitive form of organised social protest, perhaps the most primitive we know. At any rate, in many societies it is regarded as such by the poor, who consequently protect the bandit, regard him as their champion, idealise him and turn him into a myth: Robin Hood in England, Janosik in Poland and Slovakia, Diego Corrientes and Andalucia. One of Hobsbawm's recurring examples is Salvatore Giuliano, who was shot and killed in Sicily the year before Hobsbawm's first visit there. Hobsbawm liked to use films as a cultural reference point, and he particularly admired this one about Giuliano by Francesco Rosi, made in 1962. It tells the story of the Sicilian bandit's brief but dramatic life and its complex local political entanglements with him scarcely appearing on screen as a living character. Giuliano was a black market olive oil trader who went on the run during the war, stole lavishly from the rich, paid the poor handsomely for their goods, but ended up under the wing of the Mafia, on whose behalf he helped perpetrate the notorious May Day massacre at Portella della Ginestra in 1947. As Hobsbawm says, brilliantly reconstructed in Rosi's film. 'Bandit heroes are not expected to make a world of equality,' he writes, 'they can only right wrongs and prove that sometimes oppression can be turned upside down. Thus the bandit is helpless before the forces of the new society, which he cannot understand. The future lay with political organisation.' He was also pushing the boundaries of what Marxism was. Marxists don't really or didn't really study bandits. They're interested in the working class. These were things that were going to disappear. They weren't going to change the world, the peasants. And it was original in the sense of that subaltern studies, looking at the people that Gramsci said were kind of the outsiders. And I think that interest was very original, at that time. Eric had a huge passion and compassion for peasants. It was really very serious, I think he thought of it a little bit as they should be a separate political class and they would be, that he hoped they would be the future and they would make the revolution. I think once in a tremendous row I think I probably said, 'well you only like peasants anyway', something like that. Things people say when they're in a rage. By the end of the 1950s, Hobsbawm had established a reputation as a historian. But behind this professional success, it had been a tough decade in his personal life. He had married his first wife, Muriel Seaman, in 1942, but after the war their relationship fell apart. That marriage had failed in 1952 and we even find in the files here references to Hobsbawm having some kind of emotional breakdown. As Hobsbawm wrote in his diary at the time: 'now I'm unhappy, for the first time in a long time, real frenzied unhappiness, that makes me weep and causes me sleepless nights. That's new. My only maxim was: you can survive everything, you won't feel sorry for yourself. And now I do feel sorry for myself.' And then in 1956 came two blows which shook the communist movement around the world. Stalin had died in 1953, and in 1956 his successor, Khrushchev, finally admitted his predecessor's crimes. In 1956 first of all the international communist movement was sent into turmoil as Khrushchev gave his famous speech at the 20th Party Congress, denouncing Stalin, his crimes, his cult of personality. And Eric led a movement within the Communist Party in Great Britain to try and get the leadership, which was rigidly Stalinist and didn't want to know about this stuff, to confront its past, to admit its mistakes and to have a more democratic structure of decision-making. In an article in the Daily Worker in July 1956, Hobsbawm urged unity and a much broader appeal to voters. 'This is the time for rethinking', he declares. Let's not waste it! But the situation got worse. And then in the Autumn of 1956, when a liberal communist regime in Hungary had been established in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, the Red Army invaded, put it down at a considerable loss of life, executed some of the leaders. And this threw the British Communist Party into a further state of turmoil. Hobsbawm recalled the moment 50 years later in an article for the LRB: 'For Communists outside the Soviet empire, especially intellectuals, the spectacle of Soviet tanks advancing on our people's government headed by Communist reformers was a lacerating experience.' Thousands left Communist parties across Europe, including Hobsbawm's fellow Marxist historians, E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill. But Hobsbawm didn't leave the party. His friend Isaac Deutscher once said to him, he must have talked to him about leaving the party, and he said: don't leave the party, you'd be very very unhappy afterwards, you won't be able to take it emotionally. Instead he pushed for change from within. In the Daily Worker he urged the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. MI5 noted that 'Eric-sim' was becoming an undermining force within the party, that there was talk of his wanting to overthrow the leadership. And yet, his decision to remain in the party cost him difficult questions for the rest of his life, not least after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why didn't you leave? And why didn't you leave for so long after? I, in the first place, I never wanted to belong to the people who had left and turned against. I don't want to be in that company, I didn't want to be in that company. In the second place, I did not want to betray the people I knew who had actually sacrificed their lives, and lost. You see, a lot of people, people like myself, had very easy lives, by and large. But there are others of my friends and comrades who haven't. He didn't want to be an ex-communist. He didn't want to betray, in a sense, the comrades who were with him in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s, the ones he knew were sincere people. He would have felt embarrassed about it. He did not stay because of any feeling of loyalty to either the British Communists, and certainly not the the Soviet Union. I think he was emotionally too closely bound up in the communist movement after all the other members of the Communist Party Historians Group and others had largely joined it over the issue of the Spanish Civil War, but Hobsbawm joined it earlier on. So the reason, when the Spanish Civil War was over, for most of them, staying in had kind of pretty well gone, in many ways. But for him it wasn't. People think that he thought the same because he didn't leave the party, so he must have not minded that they killed so many people or did this and that. But his views evolved the same as everybody else's, but he just didn't want to leave the party and he wanted just to keep his card. All the party meant to him was that he had this pink card, I think it was, in his desk. That's what it meant. That's all. He was as horrified as everybody else, and ashamed and all sorts of things, like everybody else, but he didn't want to leave the party. In the late 50s, Hobsbawm was living alone in London, teaching at Birkbeck in the evenings, and at night going to the jazz clubs of Soho. He had developed a taste for jazz as a teenager from his cousin Dennis, and now he was captivated by it. In need of money, Hobsbawm started looking for journalism work, and approached the New Statesman about being their jazz critic. And so he went to the editor Kingsley Martin and said, I know a lot about jazz you don't have a jazz correspondent, other papers and magazines do and one of them is Kingsley Amis who doesn't know anything at all about jazz. So the editor, Kingsley Martin, said, alright, you can become the New Statesman's jazz critic. He took the pen name Francis Newton, after the trumpeter Frankie Newton, and he wrote about it years later in the LRB. But what did being Francis Newton mean to me? The attraction was not so much the opportunity to review jazz performances and the records now flooding in, or even to fit this extraordinary music into 20th century society. It was the chance to understand the musicians and their world. In short, the jazz scene. He gave lectures on jazz in his spare time, helpfully documented by MI5. I was present on 24 May 1962 at the small Conway Hall, Red Lion Square WC1, where a meeting entitled 'Jazz and Society in Britain' was held under the auspices of the music group of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Hobsbawm then spoke for approximately 70 minutes. He outlined the beginning of jazz in the New Orleans district and its increase in popularity both in this country and in the United States of America, including the strong revival of traditional jazz which followed World War II. He interspersed his speech with recordings of jazz in the traditional and modern idioms. Proposing a vote of thanks to Hobsbawm, the chairman said it had been a most interesting talk. By the early 1960s, things were looking up. It was 1962 and I met him at my brother's house, my brother Walter's house. His wife was a mature student at Birkbeck College, and guess who was her supervisor? Eric Hobsbawm. And that's how we met, at that dinner party. There was chemistry straight away, I think, with Eric. He looked at me pretty well through the evening, even when he was talking to other people he still knew where I was in the room. So it was a bit mutual. When it was the end of the party and I went home – my home was then in the flat of my other brother, Victor, and I lived there with two girlfriends, and when I came back from the party I said, why don't we we give a dinner party? All invite a male friend, that'll be six of us then, so it was me that phoned Eric first. So I was not a crushed violet or anything, and he said he would be delighted to come in a week's time for dinner, and that's how it all got going. But a few months in, Hobsbawm was given a grant by the Rockefeller Foundation to spend three months in South America developing his work on 'Primitive Rebels'. The prospect of a lengthy absence clearly focused his mind, as Marlene writes in her recent memoir, 'Meet Me in Buenos Aires'. One evening I accompanied Eric to the George Shearing Jazz Quintet at the Royal Festival Hall, which he was covering for the New Statesman. He said something very unromantic, like I think we should take out our diaries and find time for a wedding, before I have to leave for this trip. That was the proposal and there was certainly no bent knee. Time was short so they decided to take their honeymoon first, in Bulgaria, and get married second, back in London. This was all happening in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis. But Eric's last words to me before he flew off were: should things go wrong and war does break out, then buy a one-way ticket to Argentina. There's enough money in the bank and I'll meet you in Buenos Aires. Oh, heart pumping! I had not reckoned with that! Did I really know my man well enough? Well, life had fallen into my lap and I was just going to live it, I think that was how I felt. So Hobsbawm set off for a three-month Rockefeller-funded tour of South America. As he wrote on his return: In the next decade or so the most explosive region of the world is likely to be Latin America. Forty percent of the population of Lima or Rio, half the population of Recife, live, if that is the right word, like refugees fleeing an earthquake in shanty towns and encampments. In a traditional society, millions of peasants do not start to stream away from the hinterland unless some profound changes are taking place in their lives. And so they are. Hobsbawm's studies in Latin America took in the failed insurrection in Colombia in 1948, the origins and international appeal of Bossa Nova, and the semi-feudal condition of the peasants in the Cusco region of Peru, and their subsequent rebellion. He writes: ‘To call much of rural Latin America medieval is not a metaphor but the strict truth. For in many cases there is still substantially the mental world of the European middle ages which is after all the world the 16th century conquerors brought with them. All this has been deeply disturbed by the rise of commercial agriculture. There is a sense of oppressive tension, a feeling that things can't go on this way, everywhere. Like so much else in this continent, it recalls the mood of Russia before 1917.’ 1962 was the first of many trips Hobsbawm made to Latin America, where his work gained enduring popularity, particularly in Brazil. He was to be disappointed, of course. As he wrote 40 years later: 'None of the political experiments I have watched from near or far since the Cuban revolution has made much lasting difference.' But in the early 60s he returned to London to a new life with Marlene. They started a family and enjoyed a more settled existence, albeit still under the watch of MI5. Yes there was a little click on the phone when I knew they'd listen to the phone call. I was sorry for the people who had to listen to to all our phone calls. I mean, especially when I gave birth to my first child, I was rambling to my mother about nappies and things like that and some poor chap had to sit and listen to all this, and so we rather laughed it off. He was quite an easy chap really, a 'bon coucheur', as the French say. He just took things in his stride. I was the one that made the dramas. 1962 was also the year Hobsbawm published his landmark work, 'The Age of Revolution', the first book in what would eventually become a series of four describing the making of the modern world. 'The Age of Revolution' covers the period from the French Revolution up to the 1848 revolutions, in a way that reflects both his Marxist thinking. So, for example, there are sections in it on the falling rate of profit in capitalism and things like that, and there's a definite class interpretation. But he also has this influence of the French Annales school and the enormous breadth of the coverage of the book and the knowledge he portrays in it, the interpretations he gives of culture, literature, the arts, science. So the structure of 'The Age of Revolution' of course takes its foundation on two revolutions, on the French, which is a political one in which the economic side is not terribly important. I mean, it is not a capitalist revolution, although Marxists in the past have tended to say, ah, this is the bourgeoisie taking power. He says no it's not really the bourgeoisie taking power, it's an exponent of the professional middle classes taking power at a particular moment in French history. And similarly, the British industrial revolution is a bourgeois revolution where the bourgeoisie doesn't take power. It becomes powerful, economically, but it does not produce a class which takes power. There's a sort of compromise in which the aristocracy says, well if that's what you want, why not, you know, it makes the country more prosperous and bigger, you know, so it's fine. One of the many strands Hobsbawm follows through 'The Age of Revolution' is the emergence of nationalism and national identity. 'Nationalism,' he writes, 'like so many other characteristics of the modern world is the child of the dual revolution.' The growth of countries, specifically Britain and France, was a growth in the power of a state. A growth in the power of a state must have some kind of ideological basis, it must unite the nation. It cannot be a class, it cannot be a region, it's got to be the whole, the whole country, which is the territorial entity upon which the the state rules. And so the combination of a state must create a nation and therefore a nation-state, that is the origin of modern nationalism. The examples of France and Britain inspired movements of young radical liberals across Europe to imagine their own national sovereignty. The Young Italy of Mazzini, Young Ireland, Young Germany. But it was through the advance of mass education that their nationalist ideals really took hold. The development of education is central, in Hobsbawm's view, to the construction of nationalism, because you need to figure out what it is that you're going to teach the kids in schools. And that is the business of a state, in most European countries. It is a state that controls what is being taught, and the language in which it is going to be taught. So you have a solidification of a national language, and once you have the decision to have a centralised state education sector, the most important element in it is not the obvious stuff, like maths, because two plus two is four throughout the world. No, it's history. It's, well, the national literature is important, but history is the important one. Where do we come from? What is our history? And nearly all the invention of national history occur in the 19th century. The Age of Revolution was the era in which the construction of national identities began, a process which was central to Hobsbawm's understanding of the 19th century. Nationalism is manufactured out of the past, and, on the contrary, I mean the past is the raw material for nationalism. And I'm bound to say that virtually everything that nationalists say about the past is wrong. As a famous 19th century French expert once put it, Ernest Renan, in his great lecture on 'What is Nationalism', saying: getting your history wrong, or indeed even forgetting history, is part of the element of becoming a nation. Which is why nationalism is not compatible with the progress of history. Citizenship is more than a piece of paper, more than a passport. However, citizenship is something for all inhabitants of the territory. The danger in a nation-state which is based on ethnicity or something like that is that the inhabitants of that particular state, as it were, the state belongs to one of these groups, and the others are less important. As, for instance, in Slovakia. Slovakia is not a state of everybody who lives in Slovakia, it belongs to the Slovaks, and others are, as it were, guests or tolerated, or this case might be not tolerated. And that's, once again, where the trouble starts. In 1975, Hobsbawm followed up his 'Age of Revolution' with 'The Age of Capital', continuing the story of the modern world up to 1875. He writes: 'In the 1860s, a new word entered the economic and political vocabulary of the world: capitalism. The global triumph of capitalism is the major theme of history in the decades after 1848.' And underpinning this triumph of capitalism was the further evolution of nationalism, and the formation of nation-states. So in 'The Age of Capital' you have the construction of capitalism as a wider system, and that requires nationalism as well. So, Bismarck is not a nationalist to begin with but, my god, when it is necessary to use nationalism to unify Germany, or at least a part of Germany, he certainly uses it. And then in the United States you have what would be the achievement of American nationalism, namely the Civil War. It's paradoxical to talk about the Civil War being an achievement of nationalism, but the Civil War was fought for a number of reasons. Freeing the slaves is one of them. But another way of looking at the Civil War was to establish the victory of the capitalist north, and therefore to be able to construct an American nationalism without a country deeply divided between two social systems, one based on slavery but integrated in the world economy, and one much less integrated in the world economy, but capitalist, namely the ever-growing industrial north. And 1861, the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, when the Russian authorities realised that they were defeated in Crimea because they were not advanced, and one of the ways of being advanced was to become more capitalist, and one of the ways of becoming more capitalist was to free the serfs so they could become a labour force. So you can see, in Hobsbawm's construct ideologies play a role but it's a subordinate role to other imperatives which are not just economic in the sort of traditional Marxist way, you know, classes and so on, but actually 'materialistic' would be a better, Marxist way of defining it. By 1876, Germany, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia had all become independent sovereign states. But there was an in-built tension in these developments. National identity was largely a constructed artefact dependent on the liberal institutions of the state to impose uniformity. Most notably through an official language. Those who happened not to speak the official language were required either to assimilate or to accept an inferior position. Hobsbawm writes: 'The paradox of nationalism was that in forming its own nation it automatically created a counter-nationalism. The age of liberalism did not grasp this paradox. A world of nations would, it was believed, be a liberal world, and a liberal world would consist of nations.' By the 1970s Hobsbawm was on his way to becoming a public intellectual. And not just in Britain. Italy was an ongoing inspiration for Hobsbawm, in large part because it was the only European country where the Communist Party had found mass support. The Italian Communist Party, you know, that he came across when he went to Italy in the 50s was a mass party. I mean, it had two million members, at least. And it wasn't just the members. This was an organic organisation, it had football teams, it had bars, it had housing projects, it had newspapers, it had magazines, it had publishers. Having come from Britain where the Communist Party was a marginal organisation, and he's suddenly: 'this is my world, this is my politics'. Which were moderate, not revolutionary. Cultural. And which were much more war of position than war of movement, that he takes from Gramsci, this idea of the organic intellectual slowly building your trenches in civil society. In the late 70s, these ideas from moderate Italian communism inspired an article Hobsbawm had published in Marxism Today, on the 'Forward March of Labour Halted', which turned out to be surprisingly influential on the course of British politics. And although Hobsbawm himself said afterwards that he didn't intend it to be principally a political intervention, he thought of it as a re-thinking of the history of the social supports of the Labour Party, what it had been built on and how that was now changing, would have to be built on something else. But of course, at the time it really did have a great topical resonance. It was when the Labour Party was starting in those years between '79 and '82 to tear itself apart, in some ways, and Hobsbawm was therefore made very prominent by that debate. The debate that's now raging between Communists is of such fundamental importance that it's now spread to the Labour Party, and indeed the whole of the labour movement. A key figure is the distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawm, who's called in Marxism Today for a new approach to defeat Thatcherism. The industrial working class itself, the manufacturing working class, the old-fashioned, blue-collar factory worker is a declining force. Not just in England, in most countries. So to that extent the idea of a movement based primarily on the male, blue-collar factory worker working in vast works like Longbridge, you know, is no longer totally true, and is likely to get less true. These are a minority, and now getting to be quite a small minority of the population. In the 1980s, Eric's advocacy of a cross-class coalition for progressive causes was seized upon by Neil Kinnock, and then later on by Tony Blair, as an argument for a moderate Labour Party, particularly the end of the 70s the early 80s Labour Party moved very sharply to the left under the influence of Tony Benn, in particular, and Michael Foot. Eric thought that Benn was dividing and splitting the Labour Party, and if there's one thing he disliked it was politicians who split the labour movement. The task was not to be pure but to have a coalition with other groups. And so I think that played an influential role in the creation of New Labour, because he was well-known as a very left-wing thinker and intellectual, and Neil Kinnock thought if you cited him in support of the view of a kind of social, political popular front then that would give his views more legitimacy. I, without apology, used and told him I was using him, deliberately, as an instrument to combat the Bennite left and the entryists and militants and all the rest of it, for the sake of realistic, progressive, democratic socialism, and Eric thought that was a very good idea. Later on, of course, after Tony Blair came to power and pursued a policy that was so moderate it was hardly left-wing at all anymore, then Eric Hobsbawm came to regret this. He described Blair as 'Thatcher in trousers'. In 1987 Hobsbawm followed up his Ages of Revolution and Capital with 'The Age of Empire'. Together the three books present an overview of what Hobsbawm called 'the long 19th century', with The Age of Empire taking the story up to 1914. As he writes: 'This book surveys the moment in history when it became clear that the society and civilisation created by and for the western liberal bourgeoisie represented not the permanent form of the modern industrial world, but only one phase in its early development.' There we get one of the basic contradictions of of the liberal era, the liberal bourgeoisie. Liberalism and democracy in the 19th century were not the same things. We think of it as going together like, you know, bacon and eggs, but bacon and eggs are not naturally connected either. So liberalism, on the contrary, worked best when democracy wasn't there, because how the devil could you rely on the ignorant and selfish and brutalised masses to understand the logic of what their betters were saying? Particularly the economic logic. But at the same time, you see, the ideas of liberalism meant that sooner or later these things would have to be extended. The expansion of the electorate brought an era of mass political awakening both for the working class and the new socialist parties which represented them, and the lower middle class, the so-called 'little men', threatened by big property above and collectivism below. In this arena of democratised politics, nationalism became a potent political tool. 'The basis of nationalism of all kinds was the same', Hobsbawm writes. 'The readiness of people to identify themselves emotionally with their nation. The democratisation of politics and especially elections provided ample opportunities for mobilising them. When states did so, they called it patriotism, and the essence of the original right-wing nationalism which emerged in already established nation-states was to claim a monopoly of patriotism for the extreme political right, and thereby brand everyone else as some sort of traitor.' By the early years of the 20th century, the economic rivalry between the European powers had expanded into imperial rivalry. The balance of power was becoming unmanageable. People drew a parallel between political and military power and economic power. They thought that one has got to be proportionate to the other. So if the Germans rise they think they've got to be not merely richer but also more powerful, and also in a military sense more dominant. And it is this, it seemed to me, this principle of proportionality which made it impossible to manage international relation as they had previously been managed, because there was no way in which you could actually negotiate permanent arrangements. They tried to, but they couldn't. The world Hobsbawm describes at the end of 'The Age of Empire' is the one he was born into in 1917. But it wasn't until over 70 years later that Hobsbawm came to write about his own times. 'Age of Extremes', published in 1994, covers the period from 1914 to 1991, what Hobsbawm called 'the short 20th century’. And he divides that century into three periods. The first of which he calls 'The Age of Catastrophe'. I think what we're talking about and what gives gives a unity, if you like, to the history of this period, from 1914 until the present, is in the first place the breakdown of 19th century civilisation. You can call it different things you can call it bourgois liberal you could call it liberal capitalism, but at all events that kind of civilisation broke, and for thirty odd years it was by no means clear that it would survive. Thirty-one years of world total war in which the number of people killed, scattered, murdered, all the rest of it, runs into tens of millions. The most appalling business for instance is the breakdown in war in the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, which was, after all, the core of civilised values. If you wanted to do anything to limit what is, in essence, a barbarous and inhuman activity, the one thing you had to do is to distinguish between people whose business it is to kill and get themselves killed, and the innocent bystanders. But this 'Age of Catastrophe' gave way, in the decades after 1945, to what Hobsbawm describes as 'The Golden Age'. And then for 25 years you get what is a mysterious but unquestionably extraordinary age, roughly the third quarter of the 20th century, in which all the problems which previously appeared to have existed disappeared, or that's that's what it looked like. Sometime around the middle of this century, 10,000 years of human history ended. The change – social, economic, technical change – accelerated at an incredible rate. For instance, until the middle of the 20th century the great majority of the human race lived on the countryside and lived off various kinds of agriculture and livestock. This is no longer the case, and moreover it's gone down at a rate which is unbelievable, within the lifetime of people that aren't particularly old. Then it happens from the early 70s on, once again, if not a breakdown but a slide into an uncertain future. Hobsbawm calls the final decades of his short 20th century ‘The Landslide’. He describes a period, beginning with the oil crisis in 1973, during which, for much of the world, across Africa, South America and Western Asia, economic growth stopped and most people got poorer. While in the West, the foundations of the Golden Age were rapidly crumbling. 'The historic tragedy of the crisis decades,' he writes 'was that production now visibly shed human beings faster than the market economy generated new jobs for them.' The trend for dividing the world into ever smaller nation states continued just as the globalised economy became increasingly dominated by powerful transnational corporations, which in turn increased the power and importance of supranational political bodies. While in theory we now live in a world of free nation states, in practice we live in what we can now recognise as a deeply unstable form of global disorder, both internationally and within states. A number, possibly, probably, a growing number, of these political entities appear incapable of carrying on the essential functions of territorial states or they are threatened with disintegration by secessionist movements. What's more, since the end of cold war, we live in an era when uncontrollable or barely controllable armed conflict has become endemic in large areas of Asia, Africa, Europe and parts of the Pacific. Massacre amounting to genocide, the mass expulsion of populations, for which we have invented the term ethnic cleansing, are once again taking place on a scale not seen since the aftermath of WorldWar II. But no return to the old system is possible. I believe that particularly the last 20, 30 years, which has been globalisation under the sign of a complete lack of control, free market, complete free market, has produced not only inequality but also enormous instability. Rapid booms, dramatic slumps and transformations unpredicted and rapid. And this also, it seems to me, creates even greater instability. Now what makes me afraid is that the people who are likely to benefit from this instability, politically, are the reactionaries. Xenophobia, racism, economic and particularly religious fundamentalism, which is rising in all major religions. I fear that the cause of reason and progress and improvement for which all of us stood in different ways, whether it's liberals or socialists or communists or what, is now being weakened, and that is what, in a sense, I look forward therefore, if anything, to the political advance of the people who created enormous tragedies in the 20th century. It won't be fascism but it would be the same sort of family of ultra right wing, nationalist or fundamentalist things. That is enough to be afraid of. In 2005, in the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson offered a lengthy critique of the 'Age of' series. In it he points out that Hobsbawm seems to present two contradictory views of the 20th century. The first places the October Revolution as the defining event of the period, which divides the world into opposing systems whose antagonism benefited each other. When one fell away, the world was left in crisis and everyone lost. Anderson calls this a 'strategy of consolation'. The other view was shaped by Hobsbawm's experience of the Popular Front. It sees communism and liberalism on the same side, both descendants of the enlightenment, fighting together against the darkness of fascism, and ultimately both were winners, in a sense, of the 20th century. Another kind of consolation. if you look at the history of the 20th century not in terms of a permanent war between God and the Devil, defined according to taste, but if you just look at it, as it were, as somebody in a century may look at it, you won't necessarily see a zero-sum game between two alternatives, one is capitalism and the other is communism of the Soviet kind. What you see is probably a continuum of economic systems which at one extreme are represented by the Soviet Union, which attempted to operate everything through a command economy based on centralised, not very effective planning. And the other extreme, pure free market economy such as Mrs Thatcher and Reagan tried to introduce, or pretended they tried to introduce. In between, try and put yourself in the position of somebody in 50 years, 60 years time. Would you necessarily regard, I don't know, countries such as Britain, Sweden, South Korea, Ireland and Portugal as necessarily the same kind of identical economies, rather than as different versions, different stations, stopping places, on this continuum? And yet, if I, having lived my life, think about the 20th century, it's still very hard for me not to think of the economy as a dichotomy between capitalism and socialism, and only one kind of socialism and one kind of capitalism. I've got to try very hard to do it. No i don't know where that one is, i'm sorry. This one is in a tent at a Welsh agricultural show where we had to look at carrots and other vegetables and and then decide which was the best. From the 1960s onwards, Hobsbawm led a peaceful, happy and highly productive life with Marlene and his family in North London. And there he's, yes, the turkey at Christmas. Yes, he was slow, he did it, well he did it, but it was a bit slow. My cousin said, whatever, you know, in spite of your good German, everybody would know, you couldn't be a spy, everybody would know you were an Englishman from the way he carved a leg of lamb, whereas normally the French and the continentals just sort of stab in. He enjoyed worldwide fame as a historian, and in Britain, despite being tracked by MI5 for much of his life, was even made a Companion of Honour by the Queen. I think he remains, in some sense, always a child of the Enlightenment. He believes in rational, objective analysis, he's not very taken by some of the more post-modern styles of analysis, but he's also not altogether in tune with, as it were, the counter-cultural aspects of the 1960s and 70s. They come a bit late in his life, I mean he's already in his forties by then. He remains loyal to the view that there is objective evidence which, if analysed impersonally enough, objectively enough, can yield a true understanding of the sequence of events. And that’s, of course, a point of view that's been challenged from all points of the compass, left and right, and also from different philosophical and theoretical positions. Also, of course, with the rise of a stronger sense of identity and identity politics, people challenge that for different reasons again. And I think Hobsbawm, he understood all these things very well, of course, he noted them, he observed them, but observed them a little bit from outside, and I don't think they fundamentally undermined his confidence that there was a story which rational analysis could uncover and that was what we needed to learn about history to understand where we were now. In his autobiography, ‘Interesting Times’, published in 2002 he makes it clear that it won't be an apologia. 'History may judge my politics', he writes, 'in fact it has substantially judged them. Readers may judge my books. Historical understanding is what I'm after, not agreement approval or sympathy.' To be a historian was a consolation in itself, perhaps, to the man who wrote a very different autobiography many years earlier. Does it make you feel like you understand him better? I don't feel from having read those files that I understand more about Hobsbawm. It was only in his own voice when you look at the questionnaire that they got by burgling that house and stealing 48,000 files of the Communist Party of Great Britain, there he's confessing to a kind of a sense of frustration and limitation. What he wants to do is to involve himself more directly in communist practice rather than just dealing with the theory of it, and I think as an intellectual he's in one of those classic, he's got this sort of hyphenated identity which is that he is using his position as an academic and an intellectual, and as a writer and journalist to air some of these ideas and critiques. But, you know, he's never going to be there with a hammer and sickle, you know, actually sort of forging the new Marxist reality, the New Jerusalem. So I think that's probably the one document in the thousand pages I've looked at that that struck me as something that was really genuinely heartfelt, and a representation an expression, of him. The last evening I felt that he had begun the process of dying. He was nearly deaf so I had to get into his bed and talk right into his ear. I knew he didn't want to die so I told him, 'another fine mess you've got us into', and he smiled. When I got out of his bed and stood at the end of it he pointed at me looked at me and repeated, 'you, you, you, you'. I knew he was trying to thank me for everything, and then he slept and that would be our final goodbye. He died in the very early hours of the next morning in his sleep on October 1, 2012. I thought memoirs are the sort of things written by people who have contributed to history in a sort of positive way, like ex-generals and ex-politicians, who think they want to record what they've done for the whole thing. Well I haven't done anything, I've written things and I've kept my eyes open and I've tried to be as curious as I can about what happens, but I don't like calling it a memoir because – It sounds like 'With Rod and Gun Through the Punjabi.' It sounds much more like 'How I Won World War Two', What? Yes.