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By Root 1545 0

he was already preparing to jump ship as a freedom-lover, which he did a few years later, becoming an anti-communist publicist for Conservative publications and a close friend of the writer and drinker Kingsley Amis, equally reactionary and funnier but notably less intelligent. In spite of what he must have regarded as my illusions we liked one another and got on extremely well. It was through him that I first went to Hungary in 1960, though, as a high official – I think he was then vice-rector of the university – he was not pleased at my insistence on visiting the great Marxist philosopher George Lukács, who had recently been allowed by the Russians to return to Budapest. Lukács had been seized and exiled after the 1956 revolution and now sat in his apartment above the Danube once again like an ancient high priest in civilian clothes, smoking Havana cigars. It was in Tibor’s flat that I had the memorable Christmas dinner with the master spy. It was to our flat in Bloomsbury that he chose to come directly from the airport with wife and children

1. Three sisters Grün: (left to right) Mimi, Nelly, Gretl (Vienna, 1912)

2. Three brothers Hobsbaum: (left to right) Percy, Ernest, Sidney (Vienna, early 1920s)

3. Nelly and Percy Hobsbaum in Egypt, c. 1917

4. Second mother: Aunt Gretl (England, c. 1934)

5. Mother, Nancy, cousin Peter, EH outside alpine TB sanatorium (Austria, 1930)

6. Camping in England with Ronnie Hobsbaum (1935)

7. School-leaving photograph (sans EH) of my class at the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium (Berlin, 1936)

8. Paris 1936: the Popular Front government celebrates Bastille Day. EH (top right) and uncle Sidney (centre) on French Socialist Party newsreel truck

9. Paris 1937: world student conference with Spanish Civil War posters. EH (seated) interpreting

10. Red Cambridge: James Klugman (top row, centre of window) with Cambridge helpers and international delegates to Congress of World Student Assembly (Paris, August 1939). To his right are Pieter Keuneman (Sri Lanka) and P. N. Haksar (India)

11. Red Cambridge: the photo of John Cornford (Cambridge 1915–Spain 1936) which stood on so many of our mantelpieces

12. Moscow 1954: British Communist historians’ delegation under portraits of Stalin and Lenin. (left side, left to right) Christopher Hill, A. L. Morton, interpreter, EH

13. USSR 1954: historians at Zagorsk. (second left to right ) Hill, Morton, interpreter, EH

14. Italy: Rome 1958. Speaking at a conference on Gramsci Studies

15. Italy: Genoa 1997. Eightieth birthday cake, modelling theatre where the occasion was celebrated and the author’s book. Inscription: ‘The century is short but sweet. Birthday wishes’

16. Italy: Mantua 2000. Reading the leftwing daily Il Manifesto.

when he had finally arranged (via a posting to Ghana) to get the whole family out of socialism for good.

It was not the horrors of socialism that had finally driven him out, but excess of cynicism. For, though he was received in Britain as a victim of Soviet repression, in fact he had taken no part in the 1956 revolution. Indeed, after its defeat he reestablished the Party unit at the university. Szamuely’s career therefore advanced rapidly in the next years. Unfortunately in the course of those years, under the benevolent eye of the Kadar government, the sympathizers with the 1956 movement, that is to say the bulk of communist intellectuals and academics, quietly re-established their positions. The career of the Soviet collaborator who had risen so steeply after 1956 went into a decline. But, of course, he had no doubt been as contemptuous of the illusions of the 1956 revolutionaries as of the Soviet regime. Taking another step away from the Party world of my youth, in subsequent years I successfully resisted the temptation to say anything in public about the 1956 record of the great freedom-lover. It was more than the reluctance to score what would have been, after all, no more than a passing political debating point at the cost of embarrassing a personal friend. Marlene and I recognized