PanLondon Review of Books (UK)Rachel Holmes’s new biography of Pankhurst rightly gives equal weight to the three great causes—feminism, left internationalism and anti-imperialism—to which Pankhurst devoted her life. Almost a thousand pages long, and weighing in at three and a half pounds, it is clearly intended to be the definitive Life. Disappointingly, it isn’t. It is digressive, repetitive, and rife with typographical and factual errors, but that isn’t the main problem ... The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own version of her story. The first two-thirds of the book are based almost exclusively on Pankhurst’s writings, but without enough attention to the cultural tropes, political imperatives and psychological needs that shaped them. The result is a flattened and surprisingly naive account of a woman whose personal journey was painful and whose happiness in later life hard won.
Richard Evans
PositiveThe London Review of BooksBased on unrestricted access to Hobsbawm’s personal archive, this is one of those doorstopper biographies that can get published in Britain even when the subject is a historian...No stone goes unturned ... Evans does a workmanlike job with those later years, but his real contribution is to have pieced together an account of the more conflicted early decades, and to have done his best – given that he is not one of nature’s biographers – to elucidate what he calls Hobsbawm’s ‘inner life’. I very much doubt this is the last word on Hobsbawm...but anyone coming afterwards will have to start from Evans’s prodigious and revelatory work.
