Great helmsman or mad wrecker

KOBA THE DREAD: LAUGHTER AND TWENTY MILLION
by Martin Amis
Cape, £16.99, pp. 306, ISBN 0224063030

Eric Hobsbawm is arguably our greatest living historian – not only Britain’s, but the world’s (as the torrential translation of his oeuvre tends to confirm). The global reach of his knowledge and culture, his formidable linguistic armoury, his love of jazz (although the saxophone was banished by Stalin), and his acute readings of personalities (though not Stalin’s) are invariably conveyed in a prose measured yet fluent. Perhaps there is no substitute for an ZmigrZ background, for schooling in Vienna and Berlin before arriving at Marylebone Grammar School and King’s College, Cambridge. Even the drawback of having an expatriate English father more interested in boxing than ideas was offset by an early death, sad and penurious.

Hobsbawm (like Isaac Deutscher) bucks the trend in one notable respect: as Perry Anderson pointed out, the main impact of immigrant scholars in Britain has been conservative or ‘Cold War liberal’: think of Namier, Popper, Isaiah Berlin and all the other knights. Having witnessed the rise of Nazism at close quarters while on the tram to school, and having fervently embraced communism during its most sectarian phase, the young Hobsbawm, Jewish on both sides and now orphaned, was sent to absorb the mild charms of English culture, including schoolmasters with a sense of humour. Elected to the elite Apostles, he was a year or two too young to have expanded the famous spy-ring known as the Cambridge Five into the Six, although he mentions that a little spying in a good cause might not have been rejected had it come his way. What really annoyed him, one gathers, is that British Intelligence would not have him and his linguistic skills for a war in which he did not believe (until Hitler attacked Russia), consigning him to the Royal Engineers and the excitements of shoring up East Anglia’s coastal defences.

He loved Cambridge and King’s, where he was later awarded a fellowship, and remained a loyal Apostle; Hobsbawm comes across as a sociable man who has known everyone worth knowing, happy at conferences and congresses, never more so than when addressing a lecture audience under Orozco murals, with a network of close friends around the world and a keen interest in sex – he offers a bemusing comparison of political demonstrations and the male orgasm.