Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Christopher Hill, his erstwhile companions in the British Communist Historians’ Group, Hobsbawm is a master of English prose. He writes better, too: there is none of the fussy “theorizing” or grandiloquent rhetorical narcissism of some of his younger British colleagues (none of the busy teams of graduate researchers, either-he does his own reading). Hobsbawm doesn’t just know more than other historians. He controls vast continents of information with confident ease-his Cambridge college supervisor, after telling me once that Eric Hobsbawm was the cleverest undergraduate he had ever taught, added: “Of course, you couldn’t say I taught him-he was unteachable. His memoirs, first published last year, were a best seller in New Delhi in parts of South America-Brazil especially-he is a cultural folk hero. His most recent book, The Age of Extremes, was translated into dozens of languages, from Chinese to Czech. At the age of eighty-six, Eric Hobsbawm is the best-known historian in the world.
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