Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

6. Francis Becket, Enemy Within The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (London, 1995), p. 139.

7. It may be useful to cite the main part of this document. Here it is: All of us have for many years advocated Marxist ideas both in our special fiels and in political discussion in the Labour movement. We feel therefore that we have a respnsability to express our views as Marxists in the present crisis of intenational socialism. We feel that the uncritical support given by the Executive Commitee of the communist party to the Soviet action in hungary is the undesirable culmination of years of distortion of fact, anf failure by british Communists to think out political problems for themselves. We ahd hoped that the revelations made at the Twentieh congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet union would have made our leadership and press realisz that Marxist ideas will only be aceptable in the British labour movement if they arise from the truth about the world we live in. The exposure of grave crimes and abuses in the USSR and the recent revolt of workers and intellectuals against the pseudo-Communist bureaucracies and police systems of Poland and Hungary, have shown that for the past twelve years we have based our political analyses on a false presentation of the facts — not an out-of-date theory, for we still consider the Marxist method to be correct. If the left-wing and Marxist trend in our Labour movement is to win support, as it must for the achievement of socialism, this past must be utterly repudiated. This includes the repudiation of the latest outcome of this evil past, the Executive Commutee’s underwriting of the current errors of Soviet policy.

Sent to Daily Worker on 18 November 1956; published in the New Statesman and Tribute on 1 December 1956.

8. Eric Hobsbawm, ’The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party’ in Cornforth, op, cit., p. 41.

9. Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party an Moscow 1920–1943 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 238–41.

10. Henry Pelling, The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile (London, 1958).

11. See chapter 1, ’Problems of Communist History’, of my Revolutionaries (London, 1973).

12. See my Memoir of him in Proceedings of the British Academy 90 (1995), pp. 524–5.

13. Ibid., p. 539.

14. A recent version may be found in my book (with Antonio Pollito) The New Century (London, 2000), on pp. 158–61.

13. Watershed

1. Tony Gould, Insider Outsider: The life and Times of Colin MacInnes (London, 1983), p. 183.

2. Chambers Biographical Dictionary (1974 edn), art.: Darwin.

3. Francis Newton, The Jazz Scene (London, 1959), Introduction, p. 1.

4. It was published in the USA in 1960 by a small left-wing publishing house, republished in an updated edition by Penguin Books in 1961, and subsequently translated into French for a series edited by Fernand Braudel, into Italian and into Czech.

14. Under Cnicht

1. Richard Haslam in Country Life, 21 July 1983, p. 131.

2. As I write this chapter, my son Andy tells me for the first time of the occasion, presumably in the 1970s, when, after two other Croesor boys had left them, his friend told him apologetically: ’The others told me to beat you up, but I don’t want to. Could you pretend I did, when they show up?’ Even so, the friendship faded as the mother made him increasingly unwelcome in the farm.

15. The Sixties

1. For my contemporary judgement of the May events, see ’May 1968’, written later taht year in E.J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (London, 1999, and earlier editions), chapter 24.

2. MAGNUM PHOTOS: 1968 Magnum Throughout the World, texts by Eric Hobsbawm and Marc Weitzmann (Paris, 1998).

3. I did not consciously note this at the time, but the point is well taken by Yves Pages, who has edited the complete record of the graffiti in the Sorbonne, collected and preserved by five university employees at the time. See No Copyright. Sorbonne 1968: Graffiti (Editions verticales, 1998), p. 11.

4. Quoted in H. Stuart Hughes, Sophisticated Rebels (Cambridge, MA and London, 1988), p. 6.

5. Alain Touraine, Le Mouvement de Mai ou le Communisme Utopique (Paris, 1968).

6. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Les Primitifs de la Revolte dans l’Europe Moderne (Paris, 1966).

7. This article is cahpter 22 in my Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (London, 1973, and various editions since).

8. Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream (London, 2000), pp.n 118, 203–4, 208.

9. Ibid., p. 203.

10. Ibid., p. 196.

11. Carlo Feltrinelli, Senior Service (Milan, 1999), p. 314.

12. Rowbotham, op. cit., p. 196.

13. New Left Review, 1977.

16. A Watcher in Politics

1. Martin Jacques and Francis Mulhern (eds), The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981); Eric Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rational Left (London, 1989).