Based 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.
Compellingly narrated and meticulously researched—among other things, Evans draws from a half-century of MI5 surveillance reports—the book provides a more nuanced portrait of Hobsbawm’s political and intellectual development, revealing that Hobsbawm was a far more ambivalent communist and a far more pragmatic socialist than either his critics or his champions recognized ...
A worry that the general-interest reader might find a nearly thousand-page life of an academic historian a bit of a crawl is not unfounded. Two things save this book from falling entirely into this kind of purgatory. The first is that, as mentioned, Evans is a smart, smooth writer. The second is that Hobsbawm led a more interesting life than most historians ... The book is uneven ... The portrait of Hobsbawm that results from all these pages of effort and detail is almost certainly lifelike, and although that’s of real value to future biographers, it’ll provide some challenges for normal civilian readers who might want a more generally likable subject ... The book has a pervasive feeling of a long-standing debt being paid, and a private conversation being brought to a close.
An arrogant intellectual, a rootless cosmopolitan, and a Jewish Bolshevik, [Hobsbawn] appears as the target for whom the triple parentheses was created, the personality type whose perceived inadequacies inspired the invention of the tough Sabra. Evans seems to miss much of this. When Hobsbawm’s Jewishness announces itself explicitly, the biographer often seems off-balance, apparently seeing it as a quaint background for which the historian retained a nostalgic fondness, but not as a real structuring force in his life ... If Evans recognizes the deeper, subtler Jewish resonances in the narrative, he is generally too squeamish to say so. Where his delicacy on the Jewish question helps Evans assimilate Hobsbawm ethnically, his relationship to Hobsbawm’s ideology recuperates the generally unrepentant Marxist into something more politically palatable ... On the other hand, the biography is a delight. Evans is extremely thorough, and his main character is great company. Reading the book is like lingering at a party with someone who can’t stop talking, but knows everything.
[Evans] is especially good on Hobsbawm’s life in Berlin, but at other times the narrative flags. Of course the research is meticulous, but it can be overdetailed, dragging us into every piece of student journalism Hobsbawm wrote and the line he took at every political-society debate ... Less might have been more ...
