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 Jewishdescent. His mother was Nelly Hobsbaum (née

 ...

MI5opened 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

 ...

Hobsbawm wrote extensively on many subjects as one of Britain's most prominent historians. As a Marxist historiographer he has focused on analysis of the "dual revolution" (the political French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution).

 ...

Hobsbawm joined the Sozialistischer Schülerbund (Association of Socialist Pupils), an offshoot of the Young Communist League of Germany, in Berlin in 1931, and the

 ...

Hobsbawm's friend, historian Donald Sassoon, wrote that: "Hobsbawm was not a Jewish historian; he was an historian who happened to be Jewish." His first marriage was to Muriel Seaman in 1943. They divorced in 1951. His second marriage was to Marlene

 ...

In the early hours of 1 October 2012, Hobsbawm died at the Royal Free Hospital in London. His daughter Julia confirmed that he died of pneumonia, while suffering complications from leukemia. She said,
He'd been quietly fighting leukemia for a number of years without

 ...

In 1994, Neal Aschersonsaid of Hobsbawm: "No historian now writing in English can match his overwhelming command of fact and source. But the key word is 'command'. Hobsbawm's capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally

 ...