Legendary historian Eric Hobsbawm dies

AFP/London

Eminent British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who chronicled the extremes of the 19th and 20th centuries from a Marxist perspective, died yesterday at the age of 95, his daughter said.“He died from pneumonia in the early hours of yesterday in London,” Julia Hobsbawm said.Hobsbawm had been ill with leukaemia for some time and died at the Royal Free Hospital in the capital, she said.“He will be greatly missed not just by his wife of 50 years, Marlene, and his three children, seven grandchildren and great grandchild, but also by his many thousands of readers and students around the world.”Hobsbawm was a distinguished but controversial figure due to his long and unapologetic membership of the Communist party, which he held despite atrocities in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe.He is perhaps best known for his 1994 book The Age of Extremes on the 20th century, which has been translated into around 40 languages, including Hebrew, Arabic and Mandarin, and he received numerous international prizes.Hobsbawm also wrote a widely-read three-volume series on the so-called long 19th century - The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875-1914.His Marxist perspective was partly formed by his experiences of living in Germany in the 1930s during the early years of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.Born on June 9, 1917, in Alexandria, Egypt, to a British father and Viennese mother, Hobsbawm was schooled in Vienna in the inter-war period before leaving for Berlin in 1931 after his parents died in the space of two years.He fled to London two years later after Hitler became chancellor and joined the British Communist party in 1936. After reading history at Cambridge University, Hobsbawm began teaching in 1947 at Birkbeck College in London.He was later invited as a guest lecturer to Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University, as well as renowned schools in France and Mexico.A jazz fanatic, he wrote reviews for the New Statesman magazine under a pseudonym between 1956 and 1966.