Fallece el historiador británico Eric Hobsbawm

[Mifune]

Se va uno de los grandes intelectuales del siglo XX. Sus libros sobre la historia del siglo XIX, sus estudios sobre el tema de la invención de la tradición o el mismo tomo que publicó sobre la historia del siglo XX son obras de cabecera para cualquiera que le interese la historia contada de forma seria.

A la espera de ver alguna cosa decente escrita en castellano, copio aquí la nota que acaba de publicar The Guardian.

Eric Hobsbawm was by a considerable margin the most widely read, influential and respected British intellectual and historian from the Marxist tradition. He wrote more than 20 books including a celebrated three-volume series on the "long 19th century" from the French revolution to the first world war, as well as a best-selling memoir. His final book, now in proof stage, is scheduled for publication in 2013.

Hobsbawm, who was a member of the Communist party from 1936 until the party collapsed after 1989, spent most of his life as a university teacher at Cambridge as well as Birkbeck in London. His communist loyalties were always controversial, but he was always associated with the democratic Eurocommunist wing of those once resonant disputes and many of his articles were regularly reprinted in the Guardian.

His fame never diminished after his official retirement and in his later years he became one of the country's most prominent public intellectuals, appearing regularly on radio and television. In 1998 he became a Companion of Honour, a rare accolade for any Marxist.

He played a key role in a succession of academic and political debates of the postwar era, notably over the future of the Labour party in the 1980s, where his writings about the decline of the labour movement had wide influence.

Labour's former leader Neil Kinnock called Hobsbawm "my favourite Marxist". The current party leader, Ed Miliband, a family friend, was also among his admirers. Hobsbawm was a prominent member of the celebrated Communist party historians' group in the 1950s, which also included Christopher Hill, EP Thompson and Raphael Samuel. But his circle of influence was incomparably international, as were his lifelong historical interests. He was one of the very few British intellectuals with a widespread European reputation.

Hobsbawm's interests extended into many fields. Hearing the Duke Ellington band in London in the 1930s, he became a committed jazz fan and was later, under the pseudonym Francis Newton, jazz critic of the New Statesman. He was also the president of the Hay literary festival, at which he appeared regularly in his last years.

Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria in 1917, the son of an English Jewish family. Though brought up in Vienna and Berlin, where he was at school when Hitler came to power in 1932, his British nationality meant he was able to move to the UK shortly afterwards, perfecting his English well enough to win a place at Cambridge, after which his academic prowess never looked back.

Hobsbawm celebrated his 95th birthday in June with a dinner at which tributes were led by the historian Peter Hennessy and included greetings from the Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, and the former president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. His last published work was an obituary in this paper last month of the sociologist Dorothy Wedderburn.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2012/oc...preciation