“The strange and often alien world of the past”

Abstract

What relationship should a biographer have to their subjects politics? Which produces most insight: objective distance or sympathetic identification? Richard J. Evans’s Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in history (2019) describes its subject adopting or being adopted by-Communism as a Jewish teenager in Berlin 1931 and 1932, and persisting with it until his death in 2012. He stayed when many left the party after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising and the revelation of the extent of Stalin’s crimes in 1956; he even remained a Communist after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the 1980s. In Evans’s telling, the movement filled the gap left by early orphanhood and then, though he did not consider himself a refugee, displacement from Europe to England.