Historian Eric Hobsbawm dies, aged 95

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19786929



Eric Hobsbawm, one of Britain's most eminent historians, has died at the age of 95, his family have confirmed.

He died in the early hours of Monday morning at the Royal Free Hospital in London where he had been suffering from pneumonia, his daughter Julia said.

His reputation rests largely on four works, including History of the 20th Century, The Age of Extremes, which has been translated into 40 languages.

He became a lecturer at Birkbeck College London in 1947.

[graham4anything]

1. Sorry to hear this, imagine the changes he saw in his 95 years.

thoughts to his family and friends.

[Odin2005]

2. Oh no!

[BeyondGeography]

3. He wrote with such purpose and clarity

RIP, good sir.

[bemildred]

4. RIP. A good read nt

[Myrina]

5. Sad to hear ... he was a mentor to one of my History prof's ...

Rest in peace, sir.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. London Review of Books links:

Eric Hobsbawm died early this morning at the age of 95. Reviewing his essay collection How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 in the LRB last year, Terry Eagleton wrote: ‘Its author has lived through so much of the political turbulence he portrays that it is easy to fantasise that History itself is speaking here, in its wry, all-seeing, dispassionate wisdom.’ In 1994, Edward Said wrote:

A powerful and unsettling book, Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes brings to a close the series of historical studies he began in 1962 with The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, and followed in 1975 and 1987 respectively with The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. It is difficult to imagine that anyone other than Hobsbawm could have approached – much less achieved – the consistently high level of these volumes: taken together, they represent one of the summits of historical writing in the postwar period. Hobsbawm is cool where others are hot and noisy; he is ironic and dispassionate where others would have been either angry or heedless; he is discriminatingly observant and subtle where on the same ground other historians would have resorted to clichés or to totalistic system. Perhaps the most compelling thing about Hobsbawm’s achievement in these four books is the poise he maintains throughout. Neither too innocent nor too knowing and cynical, he restores one’s faith in the idea of rational investigation; and in a prose that is as supple and sure as the gait of a brilliant middle-distance runner, he traces the emergence, consolidation, triumph and eclipse of modernity itself – in particular, the amazing persistence of capitalism (its apologists, practitioners, theoreticians and opponents) within it.

Hobsbawm wrote a couple of dozen pieces for the LRB. The first of them in 1981 on ‘people’s history’, the last, on Tony Judt, in April this year. They included three diaries: on his Weimar childhood, on his years as a jazz critic and on meeting Gorbachev.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/10/01/the-editors/eric-hobsbawm-1917-2012/

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7. +1