Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

5. These form the basis for the present account of my first visit.

6. ’Franco in Rettrat’, New Statesman and Nation, 14 April 1951, p. 415. This article, which I wrote on my return, was described as ’some extracts from the notebook of an Englishman in Barcelona’.

7. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive rebels (1959 edn), Preface, p. v.

8. For a biography of this lifelong militant (1900–1973), ’always one of the most esteemed leaders of the Communist Federazione of Palermo’, see the article ’Sala, Michele’ in Franco Andreucci and Tommaso Detti (eds), Il movimento operaio italiano; dizionario biografico, vol. 4 (Rome, 1978).

9. ’The vast bulk of scholarly and sensible literature about Mafia appeared between 1890 and 1910, and the comparative dearth of modern analyses is much to be deplored’, Primitive Rebels, p. 31, fn 3.

10. Giorgio Napolitano and Eric Hobsbawm, Intervista sul PCI (Bari, 1975).

21. Third World

1. E. J. Hobsbawm, ’The Revolutionary Situation in Colombia’, The World Today (Royal Institute of International Affairs), June 1963, p. 248.

2. Andres Villaveces, ’A comparative Statistical Note on Homicide rates in Colombia’ in Charles Bergquist, Ricardo Penaranda and Gonzalo Sanchez G. ’eds), Violence in Colombia 1990–2000: Waging War and Negotiating Peace (Wilmington, Delaware, 2001), pp. 275–80.

3. Monsignor G. Guzman, Orlando Fals Borda and E. Umana Luna, La Violencia en Colombia 2 vols (Bogota, 1962, 1964).

4. Eduardo Pizarro Leongomez, Las FARC (1949–1966): De la Autodefensa a la Combinacion de Todas las Formas de Lucha (Bogota, 1991) p. 57.

5. E. J. Hobsbawm, Rebeldes Primitivos (Barcelona, 1968), p. 226.

6. E. J. Hobsbawm, ’Guerillas in Latin America’ in J. Saville and R. Miliband (eds), The Socialist Register, 1970, pp. 51–63; E. J. Hobsbawm ’Guerillas’ in Colin Harding and Christopher Roper (eds), Latin American Review of Books I (London, 1973), pp. 79–88.

7. See my ’What’s New in Peru’ and ’Peru: The Peculiar ’Revolution”’ in New York Review of Books, 21 May 1970 and 16 December 1971.

8. E. J. Hobsbawm, ’Chile: Year One’ in New York Review of Books, 23 September 1971.

9. International Herald Tribune and Pew Center Poll of ’opinion leaders’, International Herald Tribune, 20 december 2001, p. 6.

22. From FDR to Bush

1. This was close enough to the truth, but not literally correct. I am pretty sure that some of the teachers in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, where I was later to teach, continued to advertise their Marxism.

2. P. A. Baran and E. J. Hobsbawm, ’The Stages of Economic Growth’ in KYKLOS, vol XIV, 1961, Fasc. 2, pp. 234–42.

3. See F. Ianni and E. Reuss-Ianni, A Family Business: Kinships and Social Control in Organised Crime (New York, 1972).

4. E. J. Hobsbawm, ’The Economics of the Gangster’ in The Quaterly Review , No. 604, April 1955, pp. 243–56.

5. Quoted in S. Chapple and R. Garofalo, Rock’n Roll is Here to Pay: The History and Politiks of the Music Industry (Chicago, 1977), p. 251.

6. Studs Terkel, Division Street America (New York, 1967).

7. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Intervista sul Nuovo Secolo a Cura di Antonio Polito (Bari, 1999), p. 165.

23. Coda

1. See my summary of the world situation published in The Age of Extremes eight years earlier (paperback edition), chapter XIX, ’Towards the Millenium’ especially pp. 558–62.

1 How preposterous it was is indicated by the example of the Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti who in 1933 had to undertake ‘self-criticism’ for having observed that, at least in Mussolini’s Italy, it was not possible to say that social democracy was ‘the main danger’.

2 At the time of writing the general opinion among historians is still that it was a young Dutch leftist making a spectacular protest in the hope of galvanizing the workers into action, and not a put-up job by the Nazis.

3 ‘The lines between the pro- and anti-fascist forces ran through each society.

Never has there been a period when patriotism, in the sense of automatic loyalty to a citizen’s national government, counted for less. When the Second World War ended, the governments of at least ten old European countries were headed by men who at its beginning (or, in the case of Spain, at the start of the Civil War) had been rebels, political exiles or, at the very least, who had regarded their own governments as immoral and illegitimate.’ Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (London, paperback, 1995), p. 144.

4 And the LSE needed less explanation. Founded by the great Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, devoted exclusively to the political and social sciences, led by the later architect of the British social security system, William Beveridge, with a faculty whose most prominent and charismatic teachers were nationally known socialists – Harold Laski, R. H. Tawney – it stood on some kind of left almost ex officio . That is what attracted foreigners from inside and outside the empire. If that was not what necessarily attracted its British students, overwhelmingly an elite of first-generation scholarship-winning boys and girls from London families on the borderline between working and lower middle classes, it was likely to influence them once they had arrived.

5 It may be worth mentioning in passing that none of my books was ever translated into Russian or any other Soviet language during the communist period, but then, the only ‘real socialist’ languages any of them were translated into before the fall of the Berlin Wall were Hungarian – fairly consistently – and Slovenian. However, my book on jazz was translated into Czech.