Eric Hobsbawm - British historian - dies - San Francisco Chronicle

London --

Eric Hobsbawm, who died Monday at age 95, was honored as one of Britain's most distinguished historians, despite retaining an allegiance to the Communist Party that lasted long after many supporters had left in disgust.

He was read by generations of students and revered for his ability to make history come alive, using his socialist perspective to tell stories from the peoples' point of view.

Julia Hobsbawm said her father died at a London hospital. He had been suffering from pneumonia.

"He'd been quietly fighting leukemia for a number of years without fuss or fanfare," she said. "Right up until the end, he was keeping up what he did best, he was keeping up with current affairs. There was a stack of newspapers by his bed."

Mr. Hobsbawm's reading of Karl Marx and his experience living in Germany in the 1930s formed his views. He joined the Communist Party in England in 1936 and remained a member long after Soviet military forces crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the liberal reforms of the Prague Spring in 1968, although he publicly opposed both interventions.

Mr. Hobsbawm is best known for three volumes, spanning the period from 1789 to 1914: "The Age of Revolution" (1962), "The Age of Capital" (1975) and "The Age of Empire" (1987). A later volume, "The Age of Extremes," took the story forward from 1914 to 1991.

His last book, "How to Change the World," published in 2011, was not a revolutionary tract but a collection of essays dating back to the 1960s on Marx and Marxism.

Ed Miliband, leader of Britain's opposition Labor Party, said Mr. Hobsbawm's work "brought hundreds of years of British history to hundreds of thousands of people."

"He brought history out of the ivory tower and into people's lives," Miliband said.

The late British historian A.J.P. Taylor said Hobsbawm's work was distinguished by precise explanations of what happened and his interest in ordinary people.

"Most historians, by a sort of occupational disease, are interested only in the upper classes and assume that they themselves would have been numbered among the privileged if they had lived a century or two ago - a most unlikely assumption," Taylor wrote. "Mr. Hobsbawm places his loyalty firmly on the other side of the barricades."

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was born June 9, 1917, in Alexandria, Egypt. His father was British, descended from artisans from Poland and Russia, and his mother's family was cultured, middle-class Viennese.

The family moved to Vienna when he was two. Following the deaths of his father and then his mother, he moved to Berlin in 1931 to live with relatives, and joined the Socialist Schoolboys.

"In Germany, there wasn't any alternative left," he said in an interview with Maya Jaggi published in the Guardian newspaper in 2002.

"Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed."

He once said he was "lucky - yes, lucky enough - to live in Berlin before Hitler came to power."

"And if you don't feel that you are part of world history at that time, you never will."

Mr. Hobsbawm was appointed a lecturer at Birkbeck College in London, spending his entire career on the faculty and eventually being appointed president.

In 1998, he was made a Companion of Honor, a rare award for a historian, placing him in the ranks of luminaries Stephen Hawking, Doris Lessing and Sir Ian McKellan.