Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [0]
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Preface
1 - Overture
2 - A Child in Vienna
3 - Hard Times
4 - Berlin: Weimar Dies
5 - Berlin: Brown and Red
6 - On the Island
I
II
III
IV
V
7 - Cambridge
8 - Against Fascism and War
9 - Being Communist
I
II
10 - War
I
II
III
11 - Cold War
I
II
III
III
12 - Stalin and After
I
II
III
IV
13 - Watershed
14 - Under Cnicht
15 - The Sixties
I
II
16 - A Watcher in Politics
I
II
III
17 - Among the Historians
18 - In the Global Village
19 - Marseillaise
20 - From Franco to Berlusconi
I
II
III
21 - Third World
I
II
III
IV
22 - From FDR to Bush
I
II
III
23 - Coda
I
II
III
Notes
Copyright Page
To my grandchildren
List of Illustrations
Photographic acknowledgements appear in parentheses.
1. Mimi, Nelly and Gretl Grün
2. Percy, Ernest and Sidney Hobsbaum
3. Nelly and Percy Hobsbaum
4. Aunt Gretl
5. Mother, Nancy, cousin Peter and EH
6. Camping with Ronnie Hobsbaum
7. School-leaving photograph at the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium
8. The Popular Front government celebrates Bastille Day
9. World student conference, Paris 1937
10. James Klugmann and delegates at the Congress of World Student Assembly, Paris 1939
11. John Cornford
12. British Communist historians’ delegation to Moscow, 1954
13. British historians at Zagorsk
14. EH in Rome, 1958
15. Eightieth birthday cake, Genoa 1997
16. Italy 2000: reading Il Manifesto (Vincenzo Cotinelli)
17. Trafalgar Square 1961: front page of Daily Herald ( Daily Herald)
18. Trafalgar Square 1961: EH among policemen (Daily Herald )
19. Marlene and EH (Enzo Crea)
20. EH before the era of computers
21. George Eisler
22. Pierre Bourdieu
23. Ralph Gleason
24. Clemens Heller
25. EH with President Cardoso
26. Hortensia Allende
27. EH lecturing in Mexico
28. EH above Llyn Arddy, Wales
29. In Gwenddwr, Powys
30. EH and Markus Wolf
31. An old historian (Giuliano Ben Vegnú)
Preface
Writers of autobiographies have also to be readers of autobiographies. In the course of writing this book I have been surprised to find how many of the men and women I have known have gone into print about their own lives, not to mention the (usually) more eminent or scandalous ones who have had them written by other people. And I am not even counting the considerable number of autobiographical writings by contemporaries disguised as fiction. Perhaps the surprise is unjustified. People whose profession implies writing and communicating tend to move around among other people who do so. Still, there they are, articles, interviews, print, tapes, even videotapes, and volumes such as this, a surprisingly large number of them by men and women who have spent their careers in universities. I am not alone.
Nevertheless, the question arises why someone like myself should write an autobiography and, more to the point, why others who have no particular connections with me, or may not even have known of my existence before seeing the jacket in a bookshop, should find it worth reading. I do not belong to the people who appear to be classified as a special sub-species in the biography section of at least one London bookshop chain as ‘Personalities’, or, as the jargon of today has it, ‘celebrities’, that is to say people sufficiently widely known, for whatever reason, for their very name to arouse curiosity about their lives. I do not belong to the class whose public lives entitle them to call their autobiographies ‘Memoirs’, generally men and women who have actions on a wider public stage to record or defend, or who have lived close to great events and those who took decisions affecting them. I have not been among them. Probably my name will figure in the histories of one or two specialized fields, such as twentieth-century Marxism and historiography, and perhaps it will crop up in some books on twentieth-century British intellectual culture. Beyond that, if my name were somehow to disappear completely from sight, like my parents