INTERESTING TIMES
Eric Hobsbawm
Allen Lane
448 pp
£20.00

Lots of us will already be familiar with Eric Hobsbawm's work as a historian, from his early studies of Primitive Rebels and Labouring Men to the celebrated series of books on the Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of Empire and Age of Extremes. We know him as fluent, lucid and preternaturally well-informed, and will not be surprised to learn that he has enjoyed a glittering career as a University Professor on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition we will surely be aware –the reputation precedes him wherever he goes – that he became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the thirties, never resigned, and would probably still be in it if it still existed.

At the age of 85, the austere Communist historian has now reinvented himself as a prodigious memoirist and autobiographer. The story begins in Egypt, where he was born in 1917 to a British father and a German mother. (The eccentric spelling of the Jewish family name is due to a slip of the pen by the clerk who registered his birth at the British Consulate in Alexandria.) His parents were poor but passionate and enterprising, and unfazed by the war that was raging between their respective countries. When peace broke out they moved to Vienna, had a second child, and spent ten years getting poorer and poorer, despite his efforts as an entrepreneur and hers as a novelist and translator. The heart attack that killed Hobsbawm's father in 1929 seems to have been caused by financial worry, and his mother, aged only 36, died in a state of generalised despair two years later.

The bereaved fourteen-year-old boy was packed off to Germany to live with an English Uncle who worked on the margins of the film industry in Berlin. Soon he witnessed the beginnings of Nazism and joined a Communist youth organization, but it was for reasons of commerce rather than politics that his new family migrated to London in 1933. The young Hobsbawm was baffled by the masters at St Marylebone Grammar School, who seemed more interested in 'sense of humour' than intellectual excellence. But his English was as natural as his German, and he found that he "took to examinations as to ice-cream". Within three years his diligence and acuity were rewarded with a place at Cambridge University, and a firm footing for a remarkable career.

You do not have to be a devotee of depth psychology to suspect an element of sublimation in the self-discipline with which an uprooted central European orphan transformed himself into a high-flying academic and Britain's leading communist intellectual. These psychoanalytic suspicions will only be strengthened by Interesting Times.The book is crammed with sharply-observed events, but gives scarcely a hint of subjective pain or joy, and offers none of the good-humoured admissions of folly or humiliation with which other autobiographers try to charm or disarm their readers. These are the memories of a formidably accomplished adult rather than an awkward, wounded child.

Hobsbawm's commitment to politics comes across as passionate but eerily impersonal. "In the Vienna of the late 1920s," he says, "one acquired political consciousness as naturally as sexual awareness" – a confession which, it must be said, leaves quite a few avenues unexplored. He admits that even now he cannot help thinking of the Russian revolution as "the hope of the world", though he adds, with uncanny detachment, that "that project has demonstrably failed, and, as I now know, was bound to fail."

Communists like him, he states, had no interest in mass political movements, and were neither "cultural dissidents" nor "romantics". They thought of themselves as a 'small selected group' of expert operatives who, by dint of ruthless "organization and routine", were going to form the nucleus of the régime which would sooner or later replace the bourgeois state. There is neither warmth nor wistfulness, regret nor resentment, in Hobsbawm's memories of the Party whose discipline he accepted for more than fifty years, though there is a suggestion of perversely passive disloyalty in his bewildering remark that 'they chose not to expel me, but that was their choice, not mine.'

Hobsbawm is a historian as well as a communist, but as far as he is concerned history is above politics, requiring no more and no less than good powers of observation and a willing suspension of "passions, emotions, ideologies and fears". He has always been keen to prove himself "a member in good standing of the intellectual community", with an unquenchable appetite for university titles and honours. As a student he joined the Cambridge Apostles as well as the Communist Party, and evidently felt no incongruity in supporting one of the world's leading organs of intellectual snobbishness at the same time as fighting for proletarian revolution. He regrets the decline of selective Grammar Schools and adores the egregious privileges of Cambridge University. If the revolution he dreamt of had swept him to power as People's Commissar for Education, the denizens of Britain's poshest academic institutions could still have slumbered soundly in their armchairs.

Interesting Times illuminates hundreds of topics, from the nature of pre-capitalist economies in South America to the traditions of Italian Communism, not to mention the revival of the Labour Party, in which Hobsbawm played a leading role. But like all autobiographies, it is as notable for what it unwittingly reveals as for what it explicitly says. Hobsbawm confesses that he began to feel politically estranged when veteran communists like him were upstaged by a new generation of would-be revolutionaries in the 1960s. "We seemed to be using the same vocabulary," he recalls, "but we did not appear to speak the same language." There is a vein of impatient rationalism in him that seems to run even deeper than his inveterate Communism, and he has never had any sympathy with the politics of sentiment or identity (whether feminist or nationalist) or with any forms of cultural dissidence. He ends his story with a touching portrayal of himself lying on a hospital bed in London watching the collapse of the twin towers live on television. "It had everything," he notes, "that was bad about the twentieth century." The world, it seems, had taken leave of his secular humanist hopes. As a rationalist for whom life itself had become unreasonable, he had no choice but to retreat a little further inside his protective shell.

Interesting Times is available from Amazon (UK)