Eric the Red

Sir Richard Evans, retired regius professor of history at Cambridge, has always been a hefty historian. The densely compacted facts in his books, the evidence of an inexorable mind incessantly at work, the knock-out blows that he has dealt to adversaries from David Irving upwards — they all characterise authoritative books by a hard-man among scholars. But in retirement, it seems, the great man is mellowing. His latest book — a biography of his friend, the historian Eric Hobsbawm — is a masterpiece of gentle empathy.

Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria, where his father (a naturalised British citizen of Polish origins) worked for the Egyptian Post & Telegraph service. His mother’s family were jewellers in Vienna. The family left Alexandria for the Austrian capital soon after the end of the first world war. Hobsbawm began intensive reading at the age of ten and never stopped. He was already prodigiously literate when he was orphaned at 14. The storytellers and stylists of several European languages set him standards of captivating prose writing which even Marxist doctrine could not deaden. The great success of his mass-market books, which began in the 1960s, is easily explicable: he approached history while steeped in literature.

The newly orphaned Hobsbawm lived for two years with an uncle in Berlin. He declared himself a communist after reading the poems of Bertolt Brecht, and made an intensive reading of Marx. His embarrassment at his threadbare clothes and rickety bicycle made him ripe for conversion. As a communist, he could embrace poverty as a virtue, and therefore feel pride in deprivation rather than shame. Emotionally adrift, he found a version of family stability in party life and a sure sense of belonging.

In 1933, for reasons unrelated to the Nazi threat to Jewry, Hobsbawm went to live with another uncle in London’s Maida Vale.