Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

6 So was Professor Sven Ulric Palme of Stockholm University, who proposed me for my first honorary degree, crowned by a real laurel wreath, which our cleaning lady in Clapham later threw in the dustbin. (Swedish academia takes itself sufficiently seriously not to see anything out-of-the-way in a collection of middle-aged scholars in dark suits and laurel wreaths conversing, with glasses of champagne, as in a modern-dress production of Julius Caesar.)

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 Liberta 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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v1.0

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