"To Come to Terms With the Failure of the Cause"

"The first and perhaps the most important thing to note is that his historical work was never purely Marxist. Far from being a 'central European intellectual', as some have claimed, he was influenced above all by French intellectual ideas, particularly those of the group of historians associated with the periodical Annales. Hobsbawm’s mentor at Cambridge in the late 1930s and afterwards, the economic historian Mounia Postan, introduced him to the work of the Annales, inviting their leading figure Marc Bloch to Cambridge and sharing in many respects their belief in history as an all-encompassing discipline, dealing analytically not only with politics, economy and society but also with the arts and indeed all aspects of life in the past."

Richard J. Evans at The Guardian considers the life of Eric Hobsbawm.