Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [248]
7 ‘Trade unionism, with all its limitations, is never able to overlook the masses, because it organizes millions of them all the time, and has to mobilize them quite a lot of the time. But capturing the Labour Party for the left can be done in the short run without reference to the masses. It could, in theory, be achieved pretty well entirely by … a few tens of thousands of committed socialists and left Labour people by means of meetings, the drafting of resolutions and votes. The illusion of the early 1980s is that organization can replace politics,’ in Martin Jacques and Francis Mulhern (eds), The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981), p. 173.
8 I may have been the first to bring the term into the electoral debate.
9 The politics of this Burgundian town, immortalized in an interwar novel of that name by Gabriel Chevalier, turned on the proposed location of a public urinal – another characteristic feature of life in the Third Republic – disputed between right and left.
10 Topaze was inevitably in my mind, and made it difficult to keep a straight face when, many years later, the French government awarded me the ‘Palmes Academiques’.
11 However, for a few years before the rise of American and Australian tennis in the 1930s, France played a prominent role on the international tennis scene, through the ‘Four Musketeers’ – Cochet, Lacoste, Brugnon and Borotra – and one of the rare prominent sportswomen of the time, Suzanne Lenglen.
12 ‘Alors, vous avez bien connu mes prisons.’ The anecdote was told me by the publisher himself.
13 The first units formally recruited and organized for international volunteers, by the Italian Giustizia e Libertà group, date to the end of August; the Comintern’s International Brigades were set up rather later. Most of the original foreign units were composed of foreigners who were in Barcelona for a ‘People’s Olympiad’ at the moment of the generals’ insurrection. John Cornford (see chapter 8), who must have arrived in Barcelona at about the time I reached the frontier, decided to enlist ‘quite impulsively’ (Peter Stansky and William Abraham, Journey to the Frontier, London, 1966, p. 328) about a week later.
14 The name of Francesco Rosi’s 1976 film, based on a novel by the superb Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia.
Copyright © 2002 by Eric Hobsbawm
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in
Great Britain by Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, in 2002.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
A portion of this book previously appeared in the
Chronicle of Higher Education.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hobsbawm, E. J. (Eric J.), 1917–
Interesting times : a twentieth-century life / Eric Hobsbawm.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-0-307-42641-3
1. Hobsbawm, E. J. (Eric J.), 1917– 2. Historians—Great Britain—
Biography. 3. History Modern—20th century. 4. Twentieth century.
I. Title.
D15.H63 A.82’092—dc21 [B] 2002192691
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Table of Contents
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