Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History by Richard J Evans review: A fair biography, despite some indulgences

A colleague familiar with Eric Hobsbawm summed him up pretty much in two words. “Evil” was one, and you can guess the other. It’s a widely held opinion that this intellectually brilliant titan of the left, the most widely published historian in the world and pioneer of economic and social history, was in fact just a tankie: an unrepentant Stalinist who rationalised totalitarianism and political mass murder with some teleological cobblers gleaned from Marx.

Not by Richard J Evans, though, another distinguished historian, who has written what looks to be the official biography, though it’s not called as much. Throughout, Hobsbawm is referred to as “Eric”. Evans confesses: “The more I have read his writings the more I have come to admire and respect him not just as a historian but as a person.”

Despite some indulgences, Evans is fair. The more you look through Hobsbawm’s voluminous works – the books (rarely out of print), academic articles, journalism, broadcasts, lectures, plus a submerged mass of unpublished letters, essays and diaries – the more you see that, yes, he could be an evil sod, but not all the time.

Evans does go a bit too far when he claims that Hobsbawm was “never a Stalinist”. After all, how could someone who signed up for communism in the 1930s be anything but? The classic litmus test is the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, to crush a democratic rebellion. Many in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) quit over it.

Hobsbawm failed the test. He stayed on, but rather confusingly, or confusedly, he both justified the intervention and condemned it. All this is punctiliously presented by Evans. We know much of the detail because MI5 were bugging the CPGB, and Evans makes extensive use of the interminable rows Eric and his comrades often had.

According to the spooks’ transcripts, Bill Wainwright, deputy secretary of the CPGB, called comrade Hobsbawm “a swine”, while general secretary Harry Politt was kinder, opting for “young rogue”. You get the impression that the MI5 officers actually ended up sympathising with the CPGB “traitors”, and sharing their exasperation at Hobsbawm’s occasionally childish ways.

Evans concludes that Hobsbawm wanted to have his communist cake and eat it. He was sincerely committed to the cause, as the only resistance to Fascism and Nazism, but temperamentally incapable of submitting to Leninist discipline. A communist, but not a Communist.

Anyway, by the 1990s Hobsbawm was a Liberal Democrat. Apart from the house in Hampstead (naturally) the Hobsbawms maintained a holiday cottage in the Brecon and Radnor constituency, where the Lib Dems happened to be the challengers to the Tories. Therefore, Hobsbawm registered his tactical vote there (his wife Marlene was content voting for Glenda Jackson as the very epitome of north London sensibilities).

Hobsbawm was almost an outrider for what we later knew as New Labour, though at first his ideas were adopted by the hard, Bennite left. His famous 1978 lecture “The Forward March of Labour Halted” had a substantial impact. Hobsbawm suggested that Labour’s reliance on the working classes and the trade unions was no longer enough, given societal changes. “Labourism” was dead. After that he became “Neil Kinnock’s favourite Marxist” – albeit from a narrow field – and, briefly, a Blairite. It demonstrates that Hobsbawm was a more nuanced, or slippery, personality than his critics allowed.

By the end of his life Hobsbawm had become disillusioned with Blair (the Iraq War was the “worst” error), become a monarchist, and even admired the Conservatives “for their pragmatism and their attitude of just getting on with the job”.

His views on Israel could be incendiary. “But for Hitler, an independent Israel would probably not exist,” he wrote in 1987. In 2008 he opined: “criticism of Israel does not imply antisemitism, but the actions of the government bring shame among Jews and, more than anything else, they give rise to antisemitism today.”

Although of the left, Hobsbawm wasn’t “woke”. None of his research paid much attention to the role of women, and this insouciance seems to have extended to his own kitchen: “Eric’s lifelong and notorious impracticality fortunately precluded his taking a role in doing the cooking or preparing the dishes,” writes Evans. (I’ve enjoyed less success with the “helpless male” routine than the author of Industry and Empire, I must say.)

Meanwhile, women’s history “made him ill at ease because he thought that feminism was challenging the labour movement and challenging Marxism”. For someone who had the proverbial great face for radio, Hobsbawm did OK with the ladies however. Married twice, he also took lovers, in one case resulting in an illegitimate son by an affair with a married friend.

Via his work as a jazz critic for the New Statesman, he formed various relationships with strippers and “call girls”. He observed the activities in the Raymond Revue bar with the same analytical skill he applied to the habits of 18th-century French peasants: “Stripping is an ideologically purer example of private enterprise than most, since it can be defended and propagated by no other argument except the one that you can make money out of it. It produces neither goods nor services, for the only real service that is in the minds of the men who watch a strip is the one they will not get”.

This is fun, but in general there’s too much dull detail here about publishers’ advances, run-ins with university managements, the Italian communist party, and the vast extended Hobsbawm clan. I was, though, tickled by the inclusion, economic history style, of a line chart detailing Hobsbawm’s income and expenditure over his career.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm died at 95, a wealthy, free, happy man, a Companion of Honour, member of private members club Athenaeum and a small shareholder in Shell. I suspect he wouldn’t have if Britain had ever become one of the Russian satellites he so admired.