Eric Hobsbawm

His best-known works include his tetralogy about what he called the "long 19th century" (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914) and the "short 20th century" (The Age of Extremes), and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions".

A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work.

Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and spent his childhood mainly in Vienna and Berlin.

Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family.

After serving in the Second World War, he obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge.

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm (9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism.

Eric Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt.

His father was Leopold Percy Hobsbaum (né Obstbaum), a Jewish merchant from the East End of London of Polish Jewish descent [the name Obstbaum ("Fruit Tree") is German, however, not Polish].

His mother was Nelly Hobsbaum (née Grün), who was from a middle-class Austrian Jewish family.

Although both of his parents were Jewish, neither was observant.

His early childhood was spent in Vienna, Austria, and Berlin, Germany.

A clerical error at birth altered his surname from Hobsbaum to Hobsbawm.

Although the family lived in German-speaking countries, he grew up speaking English as his first language.

In 1929, when Hobsbawm was 12, his father died, and he started contributing to his family's support by working as an au pair and English tutor.

Upon the death of their mother in 1931, he and his Sister Nancy were adopted by their maternal aunt, Gretl, and paternal uncle, Sidney, who married and had a son named Peter.

Hobsbawm was a student at the Prinz Heinrich-Gymnasium Berlin (today Friedrich-List-School) when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933.

That year the family moved to London, where Hobsbawm enrolled in St Marylebone Grammar School.

His migration from Germany created the false belief that Hobsbawm was a refugee, which persisted throughout his life, while he was actually British by birth because of his father's nationality.

Hobsbawm attended King's College, Cambridge, from 1936, where he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain "in the form of the university's Socialist Club."

He took a double-starred first in History and was elected to the Cambridge Apostles.

He received a doctorate (PhD) in History from Cambridge University for his dissertation on the Fabian Society.

During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Engineers and the Army Educational Corps.

He was prevented from serving overseas after he attracted the attention of the security services by using the wall newspaper he edited during his army training to argue for the opening up of a Second Front, which was a demand made by the Communist Party of Great Britain at the time.

MI5 opened a personal file on Hobsbawm in 1942 and their monitoring of his activities was to affect the progress of his career for many years.

In 1945, he applied to the BBC for a full-time post making educational broadcasts to help servicemen adjust to civilian life after a long period in the forces and was considered "a most suitable candidate".

The appointment was swiftly vetoed by MI5 who believed Hobsbawm was unlikely "to lose any opportunity he may get to disseminate propaganda and obtain recruits for the Communist party".

He applied to return to Cambridge as a research student, and was released from the military in 1946.

In 1947, he became a lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London which, unusually at the time, lacked any inclination towards anti-communism among staff or students.

Hobsbawm was denied a lectureship at Cambridge by political enemies, and, given that he was also blocked for a time from a professorship at Birkbeck for the same reasons, spoke of his good fortune at having got a post at Birkbeck in 1948 before the Cold War really started to take off.

Conservative commentator David Pryce-Jones has questioned the existence of such career obstacles.

He was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1949 to 1955.

Hobsbawm said there was a weaker version of McCarthyism that took hold in Britain and affected Marxist academics: "you didn't get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out".

Hobsbawm helped found the academic journal Past & Present in 1952.

He became reader in 1959, professor between 1970 and 1982 and an emeritus professor of history in 1982.

He was a visiting professor at Stanford University in the 1960s.

In 1970s, he was appointed professor and in 1976 he became a Fellow of the British Academy.

He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.

In 1998, he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour.

He was president of Birkbeck, University of London, from 2002 until his death.

In 2003, he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900, "for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent."