INTERESTING TIMES

Such is the title of Eric Hobsbawm's fascinating autobiography 

Interesting Times – a 20th century life Eric Hobsbawm 2002

That is what an autobiography can do. In one sense this book is the flip

side of The Age of Extremes: not world history illustrated by the

experiences of an individual, but world history shaping that experience, or

rather offering a shifting but always limited set of choices from which, to

adapt Karl Marx’s phrase, ‘men make [their lives], but they do not make

[them] just as they please, they do not make [them] under circumstances

chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given

and transmitted from the past’ and, one might add, by the world around

them.

In another sense the autobiography of a historian is an important part of the construction of his or her work. Next to a belief in reason and the difference between fact and fiction, self-awareness, that is to say standing both in one’s body and outside it, is a necessary skill for players of the game in both history and the social sciences, particularly for a historian who, like myself, has chosen his subjects intuitively and accidentally, but ended by bringing them together into a coherent whole. Other historians may pay attention to these more professional aspects of my book. However, I hope others will read it as an introduction to the most extraordinary century in the world’s history through the itinerary of one human being whose life could not possibly have occurred in any other.

History, as my colleague the philosopher Agnes Heller put it, ‘is about what happens seen from outside, memoirs about what happens seen from within’. This is not a book for scholarly acknowledgements, but only for thanks and apologies. The thanks go above all to my wife Marlene who has lived through half my life, read and criticized all chapters to good purpose and who tolerated the years when an often distracted, bad-tempered and sometimes discouraged husband lived less in the present than in a past he struggled to put on paper. I also thank Stuart Proffitt, a prince among editors. The number of people whom I have consulted over the years on questions relevant to this autobiography is too large for acknowledgement, even though several of them have died since I began. They know why I thank them.

My apologies also go to Marlene and the family. This is not the autobiography they might have preferred, for, though they are constantly present, at least from the moment when they entered my life and I theirs, this book is more about the public than the private man. I should also apologize to those friends, colleagues, students and others absent from these pages, who might have expected to find themselves remembered here, or recalled at greater length. Finally, I have organized the book in three parts. After a brief overture, the personal—political chapters 1—16, roughly in chronological order, cover the period from when memory begins — in the early 1920s — to the early 1990s. However, they are not intended as a straightforward chronicle. Chapters 17 and 18 are about my career as a professional historian. Chapters 19—22 are about countries or regions (other than my native Mitteleuropa and England) with which I have had associations for long periods of my life: France, Spain and Italy, Latin America and other parts of the Third World and the USA. Since they cover the entire range of my dealings with these countries, they do not fit easily into the main chronological narrative, though they overlap with it. I have therefore thought it best to keep them separate.

Eric Hobsbawm

London, April 2002

The Age of Hobsbawm Emil Chabal (2026) For those who don’t want to read 
Richard Evan’s Eric Hobsbawm – a life in history (2019)